Blue Heat
What if the sky were to make the rye 
a blanket of torched, silt-brown suns, 
  
each sheaf its own season of burning chaffs,  
each season waiting on a ruby-loam bed 
  
for the gift of water,  
some pocket to burst in the blue, thankless 
  
and true as two thorns 
of thistle. And we, from our tall dreams, might wake 
  
to see the brown stalks bowing with desire, 
as when the present yawns open 
  
in barren fields, as when waiting itself 
is its own perfectly blank hemisphere. 
  
Thick as sediment, tired as a body 
of grief, we’d see the field’s thirst as suffering’s home–– 
  
narrow, unfastened, eternally broke–– 
and beside this heat-glazed glow we would grow, 
  
ruptured hand in ruptured hand, rustled 
to the windless air, in suffering too, 
  
made to endure this thirst like the rye,  
until burnt and bare. 
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