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For Hayden

Geof Hewitt 
The tourist, happy to be alive in a place like Vermont,
turns to the local stuck here twelve months a year
and says, "Where do you go to get away?"
Then corrects himself with a quick addition:
"Of course anyone lucky enough to live here doesn't need to get 
	away!"
And that's the end of friendship there,
the loss of universal feeling
to a lie, in this case a patronizing one
because the local knows
that s.o.b. can choose
and he's here only three days a year!

The tourist moves closer to the barbwire fence
for a better view of the farmer
astride his tractor with the side-bar cutter
and the grass is falling in waves parallel
to the last row that was felled
while the squared-off stand remaining
gets surrounded smaller and smaller.
The cutter doesn't jam and the tourist
thinks that's the farmer's life and I shared it
for ten minutes while he squared 
his field and made hay.
Meanwhile, farmer thinking:
that poor bastard got some time off from the city
and best he can do is watch me drive.
Thank God nothing's going wrong.

And fingers a dincher from the floor of his pack
as the tourist turns
back to the waiting family and automobile,
a family that never chose to cease
bickering and exit the car, but instead to sweat
and call periodically for him to drive them on.
The farmer on his tractor cannot watch them at all times
cornering the field, he cannot look back as they disappear, 
	his vision
is the stop-frame picture of their positions
every time his tractor is headed straight down the row
toward their parking spot,
each time the father, now grown familiar with his foot on a 
	strand,
gazes at him in the foreground, the carful of family
parked in the shade, exasperated,
behind.  He makes another square,
a little farther from them as he hays
toward dead center of the field.
When the tractor straightens to the row
that lets him see the tourists
they are gone.

They were too far off to see the field sparrow's well-hidden eggs
crumble under the cutter-bar, and they would never recognize
the all-day, redundant, useless scold
of the field sparrow and her mate whose nesting grounds
and potential family have been unbelievably erased
lined up in horizontal rows
like grease stains on an earthen plate.

They left too soon to hear the cutter-bar clank
against another grass-hidden object this time not eggs, but 
	stone,
and the ripping free of iron and the engine's overheated 
	coughing to a stop
in gritty, diesel-wafting heat.
The scold is darting at the farmer as he tries to
coax the wounded cutter back on the bar.
Only a square of grass remains to be mowed
and the tractor's engine is rough to restart in this heat.
He gooses and coughs it back into action,
jumps free and checks the motion of the bar.
It works and back he climbs, too high
to see the minute dangers of his work,
too far from the retreating tourist
rehearsing for Monday's coffee break
as he describes to wife and children
what they sat through and never saw
anything there to start with.
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