Hubbard Season

From up here,
the valley floor
resembles the warty skin
of those winter squash
that grow huge in the long autumns
of the Pacific Northwest.

The grass is beginning
to yellow now, the faint
parallel trails of plowed fields
still discernible,
yet blurred from rain
and distance.

Meyers Creek, not yet full
of its winter binge,
appears as a deep cleft
down the middle of the valley,
and its neighbors mirror
the fields harvested rows.

From here, I can see
where Uncle Henry's outhouse
burned down, a year ago
Halloween, thanks to a little help
from neighborhood ghosts.

I've walked these fields
more times than I can recall.
I can almost hear the crunch
of the dead and dying grasses and weeds.
The green of spurge, a chiaroscuro
of butterscotch and the scaly
clods of clay soil.

Down in the creekbed,
secret lives scurry
under the willows, leaving prints
no more permanent than the green
of the grass, and the ticking of minutes
spent on a high hill above the valley.


Note: this is what I saw in a poetry workshop, while looking closely at a 15-pound Hubbard Squash. It is submitted as day four of the RedWritePoetry celebration. Today's prompt--to bring the inside out or vice versa, seemed to fit this poem, since the skin of the squash sitting right in front of me became a view into a valley from a high peak.