I CAN SEE SPRING FROM HERE

There’s vaseline on the winter lens, everything is airbrushed in a vaporous and peripheral veil, a shadow fog teasing the eye. The fields down the long hill are mottled, a snowmelt, no-melt zone of loamy chocolate earth, frozen-in-motion sprouts of rapeseed, sugarbeets, alfalfa green against the spangled white of the snow crisps. All along the edges of the roadways, exhaust has pitted and etched a poisonous lace pattern. It makes me literally sick to my stomach to think too hard about that black sludge seeping down into the earth, into the water, into the grain. The snow is only momentarily...