Wild Parsnips

One morning, when the shadows drew back
like sheets pulled from the summer people’s
wintered things at the start of the season,

not far from the wild apple tree split once
in a lighting storm that still ripens apples,
mealy and sour and misshapen, each fall,

a chair stood in the middle of the clearing.
None of us knew how the chair came to the field.
Or who carried it there, the chair propped

against a back bent below two elbows crooked
high over the grasses where ticks hide in wait
for something blood-rich to brush past,

and over yellow flowers burst like the fireworks
stunning themselves above the bay each Fourth
before slipping into streamers of ash and smoke.