Leaving What You Had Wanted to Sow

Hajara Quinn

The train's familiar whistle

and the foghorn's high bass note under it

 

make a chord as I drive

along the river, my windows down

 

under a low, cut on the bias moon

as it moves like a slug

 

keeping the time

in the late August sky.

 

I had tried to sow what I wanted

to reap: carrot, turnip, beet

 

rat-tailing into their rows, 

but one rule is you may not enhance

 

the lie and I had tried to enhance the lie.

A couple of mallard lift off 

 

the surface of the slug trail

river into their flight

 

of fancy. In the deepest

decolletage of the mind I know

 

that this is right.

I take my exit too fast, and think

 

of a worm, its slow exit wound out of

the apple it is done boring through.