by Terrie Elaine Joplin
Under a washed denim sky go my collie and I, silent
in our favorite field, my jacket open, hands in my pockets.
Off-leash, Tippie bounds in blonde scallops over cropped
summer weeds. Spikes in my sandaled feet. Lanky blue-violet
bachelor’s buttons sprig the weeds, tying the quilt for summer’s
last picnic. I pluck a mounded purple clover, honey heady
on my tongue, thoughts brimming of my in-laws’ backyard
garden rows, jeweled basement jars, family stories rounding
to the farm my father-in-law had managed, their cattle dog Jip’s
nudging nose at work on the lawn, binding the crawling twins
to the shaded blanket. Matched draft horses, Beck and Pat, bits
easy in their mouths, pulling and pulling, my father-in-law grinning,
shirt-sleeved arms plowing his memories. Tippie yelps at the rabbit
scent hugging the ground. Sleek nose snuffled with loam, she smiles
at me and dips again. Lemony butterflies leap to the music of the wild
daisies waving near iris spears, daffodil debris. I imagine a farmhouse
right here: two stories, porches and rockers—auctioned off and
bulldozed during the seventies’ dry skies and suddenly drier lenders.
Farms generations old, foreclosed and abandoned across the Midwest—
suicide headlines. On three sides of us, towering, starched stalks of corn
rustle in disapproval of our leisurely, inefficient land use. Beyond the
corn, soybeans swim for miles. I call Tippie. She knows she’s gone too
far and lopes back, embarrassed, licking her lips, her coat lifting in wings.
I open my Swiss knife and bend to the wildflower stems, my neck warm
under her panting breath. I caress her smooth head. What’s next for this
fallow field? I cut an armful of wildflowers for our family’s table.
photo credit: Rebecca Matthews, Unsplash
Terrie Elaine Joplin taught English in public schools in Washington, Illinois, and North Carolina, and holds an MS in Education and National Board Certification. Her poems appear in Door is a Jar, MER Online Folio, ONE ART, SWWIM Every Day, The Westchester Review, the anthology Recovering Greenness, MockingHeart Review, and elsewhere. Terrie and her husband reside with their multi-generational family and four tuxedo cats in coastal New York. She enjoys gardening, painting, and taking road trips.