Photograph of bluebells by LeAnn Spencer
Cash Crop
Sunday afternoons we drive and talk
along a river
bed dry ten months a year
and fields, horizon to horizon, generous
with sunflowers
sturdy and tall as a man.
Cedar, hackberry, and osage orange
along a river bed are as much timber
as we have in Kansas
but useless for anything but scenery;
the seedy practicality
of sunflowers is more like us:
baseball dugouts,
and county fair spitting contests.
So we know a cash crop
when we see one on a winding road
between Normandy Beach
and the Matisse museum in Nice—
fields of lavender.
I have a card tucked away in a drawer
with a bottle of scent;
the grainy photograph
could be of such a field.
I put the two away years ago, tokens,
I told myself, of too little too late.
Traveling past lavender field
after lavender field
you talk about rain
and cultivating and harvesting,
pretending not to remember
the card in the drawer
as if an old lover didn’t matter,
pretending you don’t resent
that I’ve kept it these years.
Back in Kansas
Sunday afternoons we drive and talk
anything but lavender
eventually turning the car,
toward fields overgenerous
with our native unblinding suns.
Copyright © 2008 Jannett Highfill. All rights reserved.