Baling Hay with Glen by Joseph Powell

Baling Hay with Glen

From an old head injury, Glen’s hands twitched.
When the wires burst inside the baler
I’d take a break on the partly stacked sled.
He was patient, never cursed much.
The wire in his hand pecked
like a chicken at a grain under glass.
He didn’t want my help. Work was just the air
he breathed, setbacks but commas in his long sentence.

His mostly bald head bobbled as he talked
and the halting words waited like the holes
to be threaded. Always strapped for cash,
he would take months to pay me,
sometimes he’d forget. His paint-peeling
machines, cobbled together all winter,
started with an assaulted surprise,
noisily clacking and bucking,
as if thrift had a voice, and he knew
where its breath came from.

Like his hands, his polite creditors
seemed to wait for some last glitch,
for dust to rise from the final wreck.
But he went out every day, laying out siphon pipes,
cutting and setting plastic dams on hayfields
his father had owned, the dairy long gone.

Emerging from underneath the baler,
he’d lift his sweaty cap, waggle his hand
through the comb-over strands and grin,
shake his shaking head, start the baler,
climb back on the tractor that popped
out little puffs of black smoke.
I’d slip off the bales, and he’d head
down the windrow to beat the rain, the night,
the next busted wire or bill come due.