Growing up in rural Kentucky, my siblings and I used to help our neighbor bale his hay, picking up the bales from his fields and stacking them in his barn for winter. As payment for our work, we’d grab some bales for our own animals, placing them into our barn like we did his. There is community and harmony in the act of harvesting, but there is also this complicated relationship to death and destruction inherent in that activity.

Daniel Lassell grew up in Kentucky and lives in Bloomington, Indiana. His first poetry collection, Spit, was selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi as the winner of the 2020 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. He is also the author of Frame Inside a Frame (forthcoming, 2025) and two limited-edition poetry chapbooks, Ad Spot and The Emptying Earth.

Welcome to the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Daniel, what poems have you brought for us today?

These poems explore the complexities and nuances of harvest.

Finishing the Harvest

I remember hoisting bales up to a hay wagon,
thud by thud into a stack seven blocks high,
piling them into a barn and spacing them
foot-wide, so Kentucky wouldn’t swelter the loft into flame.
And maybe oak branches, unable to touch the earth,
do envy the stems freed from their soil, split apart
and swimming into stomachs as livestock, wildlife, wind
will churn a finished harvest into one of their own.
Even pain can have an outward-traveling happiness,
a happiness like the kind you will find
in the passenger pickup lane at airports,
how people throw their jubilance out,
tossing it around bodies, saying Hello or Welcome.
Watch the luggage straps, how they lift and place
with such an ease. Something you can let go,
when ready, from your fingers like joy.
 
------
Portrait of Truth as a Satisfied Belly

maybe this is the way of it
an appearing without coaxing
a nest that sprouts
from an open mailbox

to crack an egg means
to will an inside out
to unwind a shell as feathers do

a feather warms
rather than be warmed
an egg is an early feather
a pause for what path

an animal from dark
has rummaged into the box
eaten the eggs
beads of yolk dapple the soil

------
Myself, a Barbed Wire

Early this morning, I wander
into the farther hills and find,
in the farm of my heart, a warmth
peeled back, ventricles open,
a craving untenable, the strings
of arteries wound into bows.
The barbed wire of this clearing
loop-the-loops with wind
into odd sunsets. At night
their points narrow to the moon,
to several planets orbiting
personal stars. And the trees
have become fence posts.
Ore has become wire,
some artifact that once twined
with rocks beneath me.
Evolution equals fate, equals . . .
Some might claim a sameness
of barbs, saying they’ve been
fashioned to be the same, but I
see how they are distinct
in their line, even though meant to
draw lines, to keep out or in.
In mist, how tiny droplets
cling to the barbs, then exit
when the sunlight comes.
 
------
Everywhere the Salt

A body
in affection loosens.

Does anyone know
the number of years that love

has moved humans
—millions?

My neighbor would lower
upon his wife’s grave

two flowers each day.
Since fourth grade,

he’d etched her name
to folded notebook paper,

swung jubilant from the limbs
of summer, that kindly air.

The cemetery’s ground
softened to his footprints.

He welcomed it.

By the time the living turned over
his down-faced mound,

vultures had already seen his body,
thought from their branches,

surely, they’d been
blessed.
 

You've been listening to the poems of Daniel Lassell on the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.