It was about two o’clock in the hot afternoon
When Willum McCall stopped working
And stretched his back,
Standing in the middle of his newly-tilled field.
He leaned heavily on his hoe,
His thick fingers familiar with the wooden texture
That had rubbed calluses into his palms.
The worn head of the hoe sunk
Into the fresh ground like a metal tooth,
Touching the soil with a simple intimacy
The machines would never learn.
McCall stood there,
An anachronism from a discarded time.
The sun baked down on him,
A strange wizened tree of tanned bark
And weathered bone
That had sprouted from the ground
Some fifty years before.
He rested his chin of chaff and stubble
Between knuckles that knew work.
He regarded the leisurely probings
Of an earthworm
Tasting the airy blue infinity
Above its moist netherworldly home.
Its soft undulations were a beckoning finger
Promising a day when the earth
Would need to reclaim an old tree.
Far away,
A suit peering out of a television set
Announced the arrival of an information superhighway.
Willum reached inside a pocket in his
Tired blue overalls,
Producing a handkerchief which had long since forgotten
That it was ever red.
He wiped away the moisture
That collected in the ridges of his brow.
As he did this,
His hand passed across his vision.
He peered at it anew —
A peculiar grasping device found among the furrows.
Willum thought it strange that a boy’s hand
Should look so etched and chewed,
But then he recalled that fifty years
Could do such things to a boy’s hand.
Somewhere else
A strand of fiber optic cable
Transmitted the digitally compressed cursing
Of mutual gunfire,
An echo of embattlement from the other side of the world.
Willum took in the heady breath
Of the fields
And it was almost like the very first time
When the scent is palpable and weighty,
Filling the lungs with dark brown matter.

The smell invoked latent wonder.
For a moment, the small ridges of earth
Became the skin of an alien landscape,
Concealing a womb bundling green promise.
The sun, a white globe hung inexplicably in the sky,
Was as though newly lit.
It communed in a secret tongue,
Fiery and soft,
With the invisible congregation of
Form within formlessness.
“You shall be grass,” it said.
“You shall be trees, fields; a vibrant intensity!”
For a moment, Willum McCall stood in the nexus of Creation.
The nervous warble of birds
Interrupted the sun and
Chased away Willum’s thoughts.
Above,
A faint moaning announced the progress of an airliner
Sliding smugly along the sky.
The farmer looked back down at the rows he had made.
He thought of ripe green and sun-touched yellow.
In a local supermarket,
An old woman was screaming
That the shine on apples had been
Synthetically reproduced.
Soon it would be not only the shine,
But the apple as well.
Then God would be out of a job.
Willum blinked away his reverie,
Glancing at his father’s watch
(Now his watch)
On his father’s arm
(Now his arm)
And turned the hoe in his grip.
As he bent into his work,
Willum appeared in the sensory array
Of a military spy satellite,
Passing above in high orbit.
Matching no signatures in the
Computer’s bank of templates,
He was ignored
As though he were part of the field.
Willum McCall’s hands worked
The tool of wood and metal,
Changing the earth.