Crossing Over
By Doug Ramspeck

Crossing over into morning, this soybean field

offers a small seduction in July.

                            Offers a fertile flatness to the void.

As egg-blue dawn

unfurls itself as a sputtering Sunday hymn of resurrection,

I climb out of the pickup—

   half-drunk, more than half way through this life—

and think of dust I’ve raised

       on county roads.

Dust aspiring to reinvent itself by disappearing

       over farms.

Dust aspiring to fade inexorably into the sky.

Though it isn’t dust scattering into formlessness

that ever worried me—or long-leafed doom growing wild

             along the roadside. 

It is this earthly prairie light

pitching woo out in a soybean field—

       measuring us against the infinite,

measuring us as human memory and fire.

Back to Contents