Names of Crops

At a mile, measured
along the muzzle plane of my father’s arm,
iron-sighted between forefinger and thumb,
a dog-speck loped across the nail of his index,
fully-formed, flea-sprung
from that pate of keratin.
He called it forth:
Ky-oat. Coyote.

The man had a hawk’s vision:
So far away, the feral form floated in the fenceline

I mimicked his naming of nearly nothing.
Dropping his hand,
he named grainheads
as red as the sunred
arm which assayed
their weight by the acre:
twin tea
sin tree wait
maze. 20-century-weight

Maize. Milo. Sorghum.
Each a name for the same thing
for which I had no name.

He shucked a maizehead,
opened his hand, bleeding spoors
of red kernels, rolling in palmcreases
like a Crackerjack ball-in-a-maze:
Roll the ball from beginning to end.

In the maize’s beginning
our tractor and drill sowed 
mouses and bunnies from the clods.
Hawks canceleered, censored the scenes
behind a flash of pinion and wing.
Cottontails, hares, vermin and vole
disseminated out of viscera.

Count three days
(index, middle, ring)
then fingercomb the
dirt kernel-tombs.
“Verily,” he said in seedred letters.
Tipped at his soiled index,
a maizeseed split by a tendril tail
like altricial kits spilt
from a doerabbit
harrowed by the plow. 

Naming the crop split me
a thumb from a forefinger
a row from a row
and line upon line
I call out coyote.