Farming Outside the circles of city dwellings, roads point to the late September sun hot as prairie August, to women in white and black head scarves, hems drag dirt furrows, bend as light on something green or red, peppers perhaps or parsley, tomatoes or cucumbers just beyond western cars passing tractors and painted trucks full of sweet watermelons or raw cotton piled high enough to fall and split red seedy flesh or unspun threads in the ubiquitous dust remarked by those resisting the uncontainable, unlike the gentleman farmer who dug his family plot beside a grove of apricots and plowed field of winter wheat, barely beyond the view of his villa’s high windows overlooking stone walls within which the fruit and grain grow right angled to the cement block sarcophagus awaiting the dead that will decompose beneath dry clods kicked by his horses trotting round the property foreshortened by great columns of limestone leading to a bedroom with Damascene cabinets brushed with colors like the uncurried coats of Arabian stallions and dark mares in heat.
Swimming to Syria 22
