furrowed
ever dumbening A long day of standing, moving, thinking, clinking liquor bottles, talking, joking, driving. The wind moves hot and dry as I drive through the fertile farmlands and sloughs of the Sacramento River delta. The kind of wind that takes a tired mind and pulls it like taffy, until it's dull and stringy. I play CD's for the drive I have come over the last two weeks to know well, but the music doesn't sink in. The mind has shut down for the day.

Heavy steel blades have more success sinking into the dark earth. Gravity and tractor work together, carving spring furrows. I see the seagulls forming a wake behind the freshly turned plates of soil, seeking the freshest fleshy offerings of insect and pre-insect. Other gulls search contentedly through the earlier turned rows. Which gull was first on the scene today? How long did he bask in the multitudinous treats before his pleasured squawking betrayed his secret? The earth is turned again; the cycle repeats. The scene scrolls by at 70.

Closer to home the freeway's border is slaughtered with wildflowers. A suffocating blanket of maroon, purple, orange and yellow-orange and red-orange, and little ladders of pale yellow graduating to white.

Now my mind must rest as the ground, for tomorrow the blades will plow and plant and harvest again.

Good night. Good winter.
020412
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