The Farmer's Wife

|The Field of Green Bears Its Final Yield

By: Robert Rendo - Feb 21, 2015

The Farmer's Wife: The Field of Green Bears Its Final Yield

The old farm
neglected for years
since old man Crompstead left
the earth
Mrs. Crompstead always eager to sell
but somehow in the meat of her heart
she felt her husband’s’ fist clutch
deep inside
squeezing her ventricles so tightly
threatening to stop the pulse
if she sold
so she stayed there
and tolerated it
and for 21 years of thick blue skies
white cold mournings,
and grey hushed winters,

the sun would always
come up and force the farm to undress
and reveal its barren form
each year losing more
and more green,

and for 21 years,
Mrs. Crompstead’s neck and shoulders
would hunch and curve, as they,
with the rest of her organs,
began a journey to the
fog-ridden and unchartered voyage
to a destination as inevitable as the farm

a place of unawareness and peace,
darkness and ash,
quiet and stillness,
slowness and nothingness
as the farm too would lose another few acres,
becoming more and more bald,
its once bursting breasts
oozed of thick cream,
corn and cotton,
chard and apples,
squash and watermelon
now mostly a hollow,
sunken, scaly skin

It was the farm that sustained
Mrs. Crompstead and her ancestors
for generations,
its once pregnant soil
lush and moist,
a velvet membrane,
holding a dense network of capillaries,
pulsating microbes,
deep in manure and animal carrion,
and sweet wild grass,
long and tall and unbending,
ferociously green,
that many harvests ago,
held and hid
Mr. and Mrs. Crompstead
loving deeply
and privately,
as alive
as skin to skin can be
and as sun and water are to plant

It was all that formed
a placenta to nourish
a million or so seeds,
that fed thousands of mouths.

And now the fields and Mrs. Crompstead,
reduced
to shrivel into nothingness,
as Mrs. Crompstead faced the sky
she and the farm
were invited
to death's bedroom
for an unavoidable romp,
both reluctant mistresses
and both wives
to the husbandry
that once was,
and now could be
no more . . . . .