39

Pale, colour comes over
The broken combines at the field's edge,
Creeping across continents
Of grand design: the long hulks of
Red and white casing and
The machine-painted yellow numerals
And the heavy enginehouse
Lowslung at the crouching rear
And the hidden rows
Of articulated, bivalved, rotating jaws
And the threshing blades and
The vacuum tubes of thin aluminium
And the lightless headlamps.

Their blunt vertices begin to soften
In the dawn and shift and
Once more they seem godlike structures
Hauled from behind some
Far and dark and dreamlike factory gate,
Poised to grind bloodlessly
Into the ordered ranks of wheat
And carve out the chaff
With a crackle of rusted mechanism.
But as the soft light
Comes on their skeletons only groan
And sink further into
Dandelion and white poppy and milkweed.