Archive of New Mexico Poetry – William deBuys

Field Canto

These hand-carved fields, worked by shovel, ax, and bar, don’t want the water. Only the man does.

     Take away the man, and the grass thickens in the ditch, the
leaves catch, the silt settles out. Soon the water pools and leaks away.

     Take away the man digging year by year, and all the ditches,
large and small, swell with the surplus of the field’s own growth.
The ditch banks flatten under the weight of the hooves. The water
spills out, useless.

     Say good-bye then to the moist green sod. The broomstraw will
take its place. Say good-bye to the mewing phoebe. The insect whine
will retreat to the river.

     Say good-bye also to the shy green snakes that the hawks love,
and the splash from the hooves of the antic mare.

     The field lives by the water but does not want it. The man lives
by the field and makes it drink. He hears the suck of the sod as he
deepens the ditch and the thwack of his shovel beating new clods in
place.

     "There now," he thinks. "That will hold a while." And he looks
down the ditch at two hundred yards of clods undug.

     He rests, and his fingers curl in a circle that fits the shaft of
his shovel. He gazes upstream toward yesterday’s ditch, and the
ditches of days gone by-in this field, and that one, and the other
through the trees. Fields and ditches that were made by hand.

     Take away the man, and you take away the ditch.
     Take away the ditch, and you take away the water.
     Take away the water, and you take away the man.
     You leave only the sound of the river.

About the Poet
William deBuys has also written Enchantment and Exploitation: The Life and Hard Times of a New Mexico Mountain Range ( 1985) and Salt Dreams: Land & Water in Low-down California (1999).