Truck Bed Poem by Ross Lakes

On an Indiana summer’s eve,
Wind and water can twist itself into a monster one night,
And the next run its fingers like a lover through your hair.

Sometimes, one perfect moment,
no longer day but not quite night
when it all comes together,
makes you think that, ... well..
perhaps the corn really can talk.

You feel, in those moments, that you could
Look around you and see your father, or grandfather, or some
Young yet ancient Iroquois brave
leaning against a neighboring tree
enjoying the evening with you.
Like you could look over and say, “This is nice! ”
and they would smile and nod.

It was a night like that in 71.
Two teens, thinking
very adult thoughts,
Had ridden all afternoon in her
Uncle Byron’s truck on her uncle Byron’s farm,
Bouncing in the bed on a pile of soybeans laced with
grasshopper legs, harvested, captured with the beans
still thinking they were free to jump.
Catching glimpses now and then
of the hundred million spiders with their
bulbous, black bodies with bright yellow stripes
hanging like Halloween lamps all over the soybean field.

By evening the two are tired.
Too tired to get out of the truck just yet,
Sitting now alone for a while on the beans and legs,
Too tired to move, too tired to think.
Too tired to do anything but to
Breathe and to listen and to feel.
To taste the Indiana evening.

A haze rises low over the fields like a damp, white sheet.
and August smells... green!
And the stars, too many to count, are counted anyway

There’s a soft, electric current in the air,
Like a storm approaching.
And the young man feels the storm coming,
and smells the green, and hears the whispering corn,
and I taste, that night, my wife’s first kiss.