The next poem is called Bright Leaf,
and that's just the tobacco that they
grow in that area of Virginia.
"Bright Leaf"
Like words put to a song, the bunch tobacco leaves
are strung along a stick,
the women standing in the August heat for hours,
since first light, under the pitched tin roof, barefoot,
and at their feet the babies, bare assed, dirty, eating dirt.
The older children hand the leaves from the slide,
three leaves at a time, stalks upright,
3 handers for each stringer, and three more heaped canvas
slides waiting in what little shade there is.
It's 10 o'clock, almost dinnertime.
They pull the pails of cold lunch
and Mason jars of tea out of the spring
when they see the farmer coming from the field,
their men stripped to the waist, polished by sweat
and tired as mules.
By afternoon the loose cotton dresses,
even the head rags are dark with sweat.
Still their fingers never miss a stitch,
though they are paid not by the stick but by the day,
And the talk-- unbroken news of cousins and acquaintances--
unwinding with the ball of twine, a frayed snuff twig
bouncing on one lip, the string paying out
through their calluses,
the piles of wide green leaves diminishing,
until the men appear with the last slide
and clamber up the rafters of the barn to line the loaded
sticks along the tiers.
It's Friday: the farmer pays with a wad of ones and 5s,
having turned the mule out to its feed and water,
hung up the stiffened traces and the bit.
He checks again the other barns, already fired,
crude ovens of log and mud where the crop is cured.
In that hot, dry, acrid air spreads a yellowing leaf
across his palm, rolls an edge in his fingers,
gauging by its texture and its smell
how hard to drive the fire.
His crew is quiet in the pickup truck.
Did you think they were singing?
They are much too tired to even speak,
can barely lick salt from the back of a hand,
brush at floors, hush a baby with a sugartit.
And the man who owns this land is also tired.
Every day this week he's meant to bring home pears
from the old tree by the barn, but now he
sees the fruit has fallen, sees the yellow jackets feeding
there.
He lights a Lucky, frames a joke for his wife:
he'll say their banker raised a piss poor field this year.
And she will lean against the door jamb
while he talks, while he scrubs his hands at the tin basin,
with a split lemon and a pumice stone
rubs them raw, trying to cut the gummy resin,
that stubborn black stain within the green.