Nice to see Aurora's tanka and Ildi's on haystacks. Wonderful photo! Here's a piece I'm just writing having viewed a number of fields with these cake-like haystacks last weekend. Suggestions/Comments always welcome.
Ray
Haystacks
The haystacks of my boyhood were rectangular bundles, small enough to load by hand on the back of a pickup. There was an intimacy in working with them--the smell of cut grass, the rhythm of lifting and stacking, sweat stinging the eyes, the itch caused by the rough edges, an ice tinkling jug of lemonade at midday break.
Monet's haystacks series, done in rich pastels, represents the play of light at different times and seasons in the fields of his time. While no people are shown, so infused with the human are these images that one easily imagines farmhands scything the grass, forking it into yurt-like piles, cowlicks in their tousled hair, stopping occasionally to munch bread and cheese and to guzzle home brewed beer.
Today, haystacks are rolls that resemble large golden cakes randomly strewn about the freshly mown fields. There's the same fragrance, but the land has the surrealistic look of a production line, absent of humans, as if the fields have been plundered rather than caressed.
In one, long lines of bales are wrapped in white plastic, like sausages for a race of giants. I imagine Grant Wood's American Gothic, but without the pitchfork, the house, ultra modern, the wife's countenance, dour, as she puts everything in its right place at the dinner table, the family sitting as if at attention, the talk sanitized, a glass of buttermilk beside each plate.
sunset
red plastic flowers
on the war memorial
or
garage cleaning day
a thick layer of dust
on the canning jars
supermarket muzak
garden herbs in
plastic containers
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