The first field is somewhere in South Carolina,
a field my father has brought me to on a rare visit
to the place of his birth, a field in which a mule
who has a name I’ve forgotten, maybe Bessie, 

is pulling a plow, making long furrows in the
red soil. I am very young, the memory hazy
as such moments are. I don’t remember whether 
I ride beside my father, helping him hold the reins 

as Betsy moves back and forth down the rows. 
I may be holding a doll, or not, may suddenly 
drop it over the edge as I watch the field unfurl to
birth pink worms, their wriggling selves alive,
 
then plowed under. And now my father is standing 
at the field’s edge holding a ripe watermelon,
still hot to the touch—a shining green mini-sun. 
He cracks it open, drinks, and offers some to me. 

I bite into its red flesh, juice dripping down my chin, 
then wipe my mouth with my wrist as I watch a cloud 
of flies multiply to hover above us both, wanting 
to share this transient sweetness.
                        

If you get lost on winding country roads, 
driving between miles of wild blueberries, 
of laurel on the verge of spilling its shining 
groves of pink and white beneath the neon 
green of just born leaves, you may be startled 
by a dark animal ahead, a turkey vulture wise 

enough to strut into the roadside undergrowth 
as your car creeps near, then return to its purpose 
after you pass—a flattened snake gray on the 
pavement, the river of its body open and drying 
in the sun, its spirit having shed its wounded 
scales and slithered free. 

And now a deer is crossing in the distance, 
just beside an oak trunk on the left that the sun
has painted  with a brilliant slash. You slow 
down to peer into the dappled woods, but see 
no deer—though it may still be there hidden
among dense thickets. 

You think this is the middle of nowhere, feel  
lost in the meanders your spirit has led you on, 
yet found in the sudden revelations of these 
seldom observed lives beyond your own.