I am growing downward,
smaller, one among the grasses.
– Wendell Berry (“Thirty More Years”)
Irrigator until the end,
the vines were his children,
more easily trained than those
of his flesh.
Water flowed in furrows,
slowed to soak with checks,
his art with a hoe stretched
across eighty acres.
Quixotic silhouette against
a rising or setting sun,
swashbuckling overshoes,
hoe in hand,
he found peace deep within
his vineyard rows, red-seeded
table grapes, long ago dozed
for citrus on drip.
drycrikjournal 