He tells me he has never seen a field of corn.
I tell him it’s just row upon row of the same.
But he says: Look at this summer
and see all the colors you have ever known.
Mustard and thistle. Tumbleweed.
Low shady sunsets that pick out
flowers in the fields from
the dark foliage of trees
among a knob of hills.
Winds that breathe and blow
over bent-down grasses.
Crickets gossip along a limestone fence.
Lazy Susans grow up
one slope and down another.
Off in the distance a copse
of young pines and farther
still a creek with shale
slaked dry and white.
In a garden he points out snap peas
lined in their pods like rosary beads.
See, he says, how time moves
away not even leaving a shadow,
this world that only hints
of past lives, past loves.
And look, he says,
how one can get lost
in the crowded moment
of a single dot.
Richard Luftig is a former professor of educational psychology and special education at Miami University in Ohio now residing in California. His poems and stories have appeared in numerous literary journals in the United States and internationally in The United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Europe, and Asia. Two of his poems recently appeared in Realms of the Mothers: The First Decade of Dos Madres Press. His latest book of poems, A Grammar for Snow, has been published by Unsolicited Press.