When You Said Morning

When you said morning on the street today
it sounded so exactly like
what I imagined I remembered
all the farmers to have said,
days in layers,
each preceding year--
in the fraudulent cool of summer mornings
when potatoes can be dug,
in the frank and snapping cold of winter
when the bare ground breaks beneath your numbing feet;
going in and out of odorous hardware stores
where bins of bolts await inspection
and the dry camaraderie drones,
or in the chemical garage where ancient drawers
hold dusty buckets for the children under
shelves of fragrant DDT. When you said morning
I saw postal trucks and gardens, old
canoes and hillsides paved with needles
slippery to the foot and hidden wintergreen
where once we ate and once I mourned,
fallen apples surrounding the trees
and waiting to be gathered up in baskets for the pie,
and brooks whose rusty brown contains both leeches
and the tiniest of fish and are too wide
for one revered old man to step across;
and long before, that morning
racing down the crystal soaking frozen lawn
barefoot coming home from half a world away
across the sharpest of driveway stone
to berries
in a well-remembered bowl;
when you said morning.

November 10 2009