Early winter stains the rolling fields, we walk 
into the new year, my granddaughters and I. 
The grasses frostbitten, cling to the hulls 
of last summer’s fling. It’s good to be dwarfed 
by undulation of bluestem, Joe Pye, sedge, 
wild rye. Good to sweep my arm over the meadow, 
some would say of lesser beauty, a tarnished brass 
catching a thinner sun, pewter sky. Good to show 
these girls the underside of things, the unclothed, 
somehow more holy in nakedness—the ghosted 
long-boned sycamores along the riverbank, their light-
traced scaffolds. Then seeing our bodies as sheaves 
of sun, golden grain for our wanderings and weathers. 
Holier yet, to feel the brush of time’s feather, to know 
that today our roots, intermingled with ironweed 
and cattail, hold us in our place like no other; 
tomorrow, our spent flowerheads outfly 
even the wind.