CHOKECHERRIES

Thirty feet from my windows,
an old kennel-wire fence
thickly grown over with honeysuckle,
poison ivy, and wild roses
just beginning to open
into the loose sort of droopy garlands
an aesthetic young farmer
might drape around Elsie
or Dobbin.

                 Where the wire ends
and the knotted up, spiraling vines
paw toward more light, six slim
grey trunks of chokecherry
feather into leaves and
clusters or blossoming fronds
that lift and fall with the breeze
like diminutive mare's tails
—each separate flower a rose,
each separate flower
three-eights of an inch of
white disk, radiant
about a head of yellow-gold stamens.

Beyond the chokecherries
and a rutted road, beyond
locust posts and barbed wire,
a deepening pasture lights up
with ranunculus, "little frogs"
for some reason, lights up
—in fact—with buttercups
as clouds move sunlight around.

And beyond them, veiled
and perhaps faintly blue
in the distance, broadly
lit by the same shifting light,
four rounded green mountains,
on the nearest and tallest of which
someone has built a white silo
and low barn—or more likely
some kind of radar station
that talks all night to darkness,
some kind of early warning,
perhaps an observatory.

                                     I'm
just happy to stand here,
and hold my vote close,
white-blinded and stupidly
gazing into random galaxies
and minor constellations, sunbursts
of yellow-haired stamens
in white corollas.