Long-Legged Spider Keeping Up

Of a deeper color than jade

is the pond by the road,

cupped between spring-forested hills

in Michigan, where I pay rent now,

and I would give my jade

and my emeralds, if I still had them,

to belong to these hills and to this pond

or to the fruit of the trees.

I belong only to the road:

each cornfield I drive by cuts neat rows,

even-measured furrows into me, running

endlessly beside me, like a long-legged spider

that barely, mercilessly, keeps up.

And I ache for a home

that I never was born to, for a country

where I never belonged,

homesick for a people whose language

I understood but could never speak without

an accent--

a moth forbidden

from crawling back to its chrysalis.

Beneath the corn and the soy is the soil

I call mother, in whose warm muddy realness

I dream of immersing myself,

hogs and Holsteins lazing over me,

spread open to the unobstructed Iowa sky--

in Minnesota or Illinois, in Wisconsin or Missouri,

somewhere just off I-80 or I-94,

not farther than you'd drive for a fill-up or for

2 for $2 bratwurst

becoming, finally, one of a million farms,

each unique yet indistinguishable among

the million--and all the shame

of realizing I have no use for their uniquenesses

gone with my face, gone with my name.

I love her like no one else could,

this placid mother

who turns her tits to face her litter,

all born knowing how to suck,

while I stare at her spine and wonder

how I never learned this trick,

this skill that automatically comes with being human,

a buy-one-get-one-free at the Farm

and Fleet. I don't think

these softball-dusted girls, these sunburnt

boys in white t-shirts, know her face--

too busy sucking to look up. But I

have spent--oh, decades now--

imagining what her face might look like

if she smiled on me. And if I had money I could buy

a John Deere tractor, but I could not

turn myself into one.