Ohio Fields After Rain
by David Baker
The slow humped backs of ice ceased
to shadow the savannahs of Ohio millennia
ago, right where we’ve sailed to a stop.
The shaken woman leaves open her car door
and familiar as relatives we touch hands
in the middle of the wet black road.
To the north new corn enriches by the hour.
South of us—really, just over a fence—
heavy boulders rolled thousands of miles
quit the migration and grew down,
huddled, cropped, scarred by the journey.
“I couldn’t,” she says, “stop skidding,”
and I know what she means, having
felt the weight of my car planing scant
millimeters over the highway glaze. Calmly
she slid to one shoulder, I to the other,
and the earth spun onward without us.
What a place we have come to, scooped
hollow of hillsides, cut valleys, drumlins
and plains. And where the rain settles,
the gray beasts growing tame on the shore.
PHOTO: Farm near Springfield, Ohio, by Dean Neitman, used by permission.
POETRY and PLACES 