NECA

The Cotton Picker

A red dust haze lowers the sky
over the rows and bottoms
of dried stalks shattering
where the season’s first bees
had swarmed.

Once again on fenceless tracts--
mounds of dense cotton,
whose summer boles rivaled the clouds--
now a dingy alloy of dirt and rain,
rebuke the empty fashion

of any cloth woven
less pragmatic than the jeans
worn by a weathered man
seated high
over the deep tread of tires.

All dreams wrapped inside his cab,
he raises around himself, ring
within carefully contrived ring--
a kind of Stonehenge of soft
monoliths aligned with the sun.

Streaked gray with lint
from discarded seeds,
he descends from the summit
of the huge machinery,
moves like a druid priest

through this temple
of summer’s effort
where clear flowing sunlight
channeled by the cotton bales,
focuses the eye of the future.

His world revolves like a swinging door
always opening to the same room,
revealing the recurrence of events,
and he knows
all he’ll ever do is immaterial.

Rotation

Just before dusk the dead poplars
turn slowly pink.
Western clouds take on a glow
above their dark horizon.
That quarter moon gains strength,
rising to a new prominence;
its daytime apparition
cast aside now --trivial as the daily news.

Wind dies down, but the withered grasses
of this afternoon’s undulation
move to the rustle of nocturnal beasts.
I sit on my porch and watch
how, in the dying sun,
dead trees gain vibrancy.
Helpless in the cycle,
death revolves into life.

Look Away

This summer day, I traveled a clay road,
bumping beside fields white with cotton
to the grove of ancient magnolias.
Pushing aside the weeds and briars,
I moved within the sun-dappled shade,
stumbling upon two fire-blacken steps
of a lost homestead that long ago stood
in the path of Sherman’s march to the sea.

The Lovers

looking out, past rolling white-caps
to the low setting sun;
lovers amble along the sugar sands,
their low slung swim suits
revealing bands of reddened skin.

night quickly covers the sun,
and in the new found dark
their glowing footprints trail-
vanishing down the beach,
leaving their soft laughter.

with the hot summer night,
a rising tide
stiffens currents.
too soon, quick dawn comes:
in the ebb tide-
slack water.

Showtime

In a wild gallop, behind reaching fetlocks,
the mare’s streaming tail flares-
Then collapses over shorten quarters
into a leaping jackrabbit.
In another long moment, dissolving,
becoming just a passing cloud.
Again the magician’s wand sweeps
and suddenly emerging...
a laughing Buddha.
As, the spectacular show above
my head goes on.

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Neca Stoller
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