New From the Porch: I Was in the Vicinity

$13 US

133 pp

ISBN-10 : 1948920212
ISBN-13 : 978-1948920216

Poet, Novelist, Sculptor, and raconteur Guinotte Wise returns with a gaggle of poems about choppers and barns and the archaeology of the American experience, covid-19 edition. The chaff blowing over from the pyramids of silage must lend Wise some of its dry magic, as each of these poems shimmers with grace and humor and life, in all its prickly splendor.

Hay Time Again

They come with trucks and machines
that look like star wars silhouettes when
standing in the dusk. One such rig just
fits through the gate. A heat wave comes
with it and they cut the chest-high grass
and rake it in rows, bale it a day later after
the dew dries off it. Once it rained on the
cut hay, and they re-raked it, turned it over
said it wouldn’t be as good, baled it any
way, big round bales. I used to get horse
hay, square bales, not so long ago, and my
wife drove truck and trailer while I stacked
the bales, high on the trailer. I could do that
then, and if my life depended on it, maybe
now, too, but slower. A hundred bales
might take too long, it might rain on some
and I would leave them to melt, their
shapes becoming like resting dogs, then
like grave mounds of small people. Hey?