Driving farm-to-market roads
as evening spills its mauve
in the shallow furrows of fields,
you’ll see a mirage,
if lucky, a haze of beige and gray
where cotton lint clumps
like snow and stalks jut
like quills. Pause on the gravel shoulder,
ease your truck door
open. Northern gusts will
nip your ears, but you’ll hear
murmurs—flute and piccolo,
percussive stutters, rattling
croaks—like orchestral tuning
that crescendos as figures
thrust up, helter-skelter, flailing
skyward. Flocks of cranes,
at twilight, wing to a sheltered lake
fifty miles away, fading
while you strain to listen.
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