Not yet late July and the clover hay stands two feet and rising,

not yet resembling the tides of an ocean in early evening when

the sun sprays through the clouds and all is gold and rippling

 

The bull in me wanders for solitude into a distant pasture

to watch calves leap in high grasses, mountains shred the air

with thunder sounding into the valleys and over streams

filling with snow melt and trout and eager men fishing

 

Below sunlit peaks, cud chewing time smells fresh and sweet

 

The woman and I are growing thick together; even so,

I pepper large T-bones and baste potatoes with butter

The salad will be a surprise; no dessert, we’ll simply sit,

look upward at a dimming sky full with so many things:

how lucky we are at this age to still make love,

diseases we don’t have, a fire on freezing mornings,

children in their own homes who no longer can say “no”

 

Together we mourn the passing of things green,

the graying of a generation who fought for change,

bigots with signs praying for gay people to die young,

nooses that notch a black man’s freedom long after slavery,

lynching by ignorance, by fiat, by lethal injection

 

At this time of evening, another year spent, I begin to see

our world as it might have been, what it has become,

and only a few more chances to wish it whole

 

Horses in the meadow below whinny to the last of the blue,

turn and dash towards the stable, manes flashing with youth

As the sun falls behind the mountains and the air falls cool,

we go inside to hope again for the blurred afternoon

when first we laughed and believed we could outrace

the unstoppable spinning of the earth