No Quarks But Quarts
When she crouches out of sight behind the low bushes, they shake with the quick
sparrows of her hands:
in my mind
I roll down
the slant of field
and into the glittering silence of the lake and sky that binds them both to time and place.
The high grass, ripe for haying, has a clean and arid scent: ‘I will live forever’, it whispers.
“Where are you?”
—I’m over here. PLOP! PLOP! go the sun-warm globes. The bottom filled, its tinny clinks are dampened like a mystery with a plausible explanation.
“Where ARE you?”
the voice implores again, but I’m working on a jaw-full of lavender
mush and can't speak back, devouring in fistfuls the leaves the stems the bugs and all, and drooling
the ichors down my shirt.
“I SEE you!”
says the woman whose face was carved by Abenaki blood, who loves her work, works all the time without complaint, and with that selfsame passion comes to kneel on a hillside every summer,
for splendid days of winds and water, for loons and frogs and Demeter’s corn,
for shoulders warmed with honeyed light,
and when I stand to answer, road-dust grits my teeth and eyes, and squinting
I see Father swinging
his two full quarts of berries
toward the car.
In my View from Hoe Island
I lay in above the yellow fields
that monumental sun
I’ve never stopped sweating
nor glowing from.
Copyright © 2008 Gary LeBel
About the poet.
Skip navigation
12