Today the sun will hit the fields and not know where to go, hopping fences between nowheres and everywheres matched side by side in far-reaching patterns of green and gold and brown as far as the eye can see.

I am in Wisconsin, where the storms grumble thunder in the mornings and my grandfather has just passed away beneath the clear blue sky of the afternoon.

There is too much death in the broken backs of newly hewn corn, in the hazy sunsets over churning factories, in the cicada husks clutching the bark of oak trees that have seen these occasions come and go long before my time and long before my grandfather's, and I have seen these occasions come, but not pass, seen them arrive but not fade, so beneath this oak tree I imagine an acorn splitting shell and stone, growing upward from your spine, embracing bones with tender roots like open palms, blanketing you with leaves the color of sun on the fields.