from Something Solid: Miscellaneous Sonnets: Colliding Crops

April cruelty of rain-chilly wind, six months
until harvest- Stacy stands on the verge of
a realm not tearless, but over tears, so that
tears themselves form a kind of second skin
around her, & the child to be born is cried
out- here, I notice, is a place where I could've
been no one, still have no substance, & what
pours out of me, as I absorb the Indiana
farm-land, is just refuse of what I've never had-
this is what she writes out of. The erstwhile female
is replaced by a raw-nerved, patterned, womanly
archetype, solid as a silo, to be picked at by the
little-minded for occupying space in a man's arid
world. Corn-rows tilt to be livid both ways.