These are Feudal Lands, and There is Snow. Yet, and…

The dry grey grasses hang

their heads with a humility

that is the same as circumspection,

the same as grasses owned by no one.

We are ashamed to notice them.

We want privacy

for them,

the grasses.

The wind needs us not

to observe its penetrations.

We have no eyes here,

according to the wind.

Better we were not,

not in this way,

tending this land in a name that is not

the name of the land.

But we are cunning.

We.

We till, we observe, we gather

some-such thing,

and turn it over as payment.

But we spill.

We plough crooked lines.

We have an affair.

The affair we have,

is an affair

with the land,

yet this land lies prostrate

only

before 

her master,

the sky.

Covered in a meager blanket 

of thin snow, her hillocks

and clods are not so much garmented,

or eclipsed by white. No.

This white is thin, sheerest,

Showing all of her thick, dark patches, 

thatches

and outbursts.

Of this dry grass.

What is left after another growing season?

What is left?

We did glean. We did.

But always there remains this something 

that she keeps:

the smallest potato;

true poems in shapes you would not expect.