“Stacking the Straw”
by Amy Clampitt
In those days the oatfields' fenced-in vats of running platinum, the yellower alloy of wheat and barley, whose end, however gorgeous all that trammeled rippling in the wind, came down to toaster-fodder, cereal as a commodity, were a rebuke to permanence – to bronze or any metal less utilitarian than the barbed braids that marked off a farmer's property, or the stoked dinosaur of a steam engine that made its rounds from farm to farm, after the grain was cut and bundled, and powered the machine that did the threshing. Strawstacks' beveled loaves, a shape that's now extinct, in those days were the nearest thing the region had to monumental sculpture. While hayracks and wagons came and went, delivering bundles, carting the winnowed ore off to the granary, a lone man with a pitchfork stood aloft beside the hot mouth of the blower, building about himself, forkful by delicately maneuvered forkful, a kind of mountain, the golden stuff of mulch, bedding for animals.
I always thought of him with awe – a craftsman whose evolving altitude gave him the aura of a hero. He'd come down from the summit of the season's effort black with the baser residues of that discarded gold. Saint Thomas of Aquino also came down from the summit of a lifetime's effort, and declared that everything he'd ever done was straw.