Splayed deer at the Colona road

             and there are other signs:

fence-post hawk, wings dark, folded,

             bone sky dawn-streaked, the rising sun

blood-red with smoke from distant fires’

             ravaging western forests.

 

How benign the green hay rolls rest 

            in the fields, behind fences

fattened cattle graze, at edges golden 

             rabbitbrush fades to dun stalks.

 

If news speaks of discontent, disease,

             rioting in city streets, they do not

heed it though they speak of these things,

             faces bent over white coffee cups. 

 

No strangers to death and what’s dying out,

              some sense safety may be an illusion

 of remoteness, in the barrenness of harvest  

             feel a year slip between roughened hands.