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 The Farmer’s Almanac “for planters, farmers, workers, gentle folk” Its cover graced by fine antique designs Year after year printed from those same plates Whose long-dead craftsmen grasped the things they fixed In etchings pressed so deep on each inked page— Black edges splashed by dissipating waves, Four cornered winds blowing the ghostly foam Of matter’s atoms splattered in salt and air, And spreading in the center, yielding fields, Wet furrows urged by patriarchal rays While farmers plow beneath a smiling sun— Such pictures bear fair witness to a time When heart and mind could know the world as one. And though three hundred years have brought us far From Harris and those first plain almanacs Of astral tabulations made for souls Who crossed the sea and earth by plotted stars, They still contain what we have never ceased To yearn for in the long divided nights Of reason and the fancy’s fatal sways— The news of what’s too precious to be news, Perennial predictions, natural laws, The times to fish and plant and watch for rain, Tables of weights and measures, zodiacs Whose houses match the likened plighted signs Of heaven and the body, zone by zone. These brazen correlations well aligned The later almanacs would decorate With properties of curatives and lures, Remedies mixed where faith and science combine— Foxglove for palpitations, burdock’s surge, Skin glowing with aloe vera, bladderwrack In thinning and those bilberry brightened eyes, Mullein for easy breaths, garlic to open Arteries, cayenne for circulation— And near these rendered simples long dispensed By pastoral physicians, happy ads For weather-sticks bending in ice and sun,  An eight ball’s love prognostics, sexy shots Of would-be virgin brides from Singapore, And all those notions, lotions, potions, sprays For bumper crops of greenbacks, beans, and hairs, Flat muscled bellies rippling, stirring bowels, And prostates raising cocks up from the dead— Snake oil of the medicine show Asclepians! Yet why if now we’ve come so far beyond Old pictures of the heavens and the flesh And tall-tale claims the almanacs still run Do we keep faith and heed them when we have The Weather Channel, Playboy, CNN, E-mail, the Internet, and Fax machines, The Hubble Telescope, the AMA, Wall Street and Wal-Mart drugs, and A&Ps? Perhaps, as the cover says, for “the great And little secrets of the world, visions, Divinations, nostalgia, curious lore” Not only in the nostrums and the charts Of solstice, syzygy, and equinox, But in the long-dead etchers’ finest lines— Ripe apple orchards russet in the dusk, A Bible verse cut deep on family stones By names that stay through centuries the same, Sealed jars of golden peaches on a shelf Put up against a window filled with snow, And most of all in noonday harvest fields When hay wains pause amid the windy rows Of hissing ricks that lift the drivers’ songs Till music breaks in silence toward the light And parted fact and fiction blend as one In metrical conversions of the heart, Transcendent transpositions never done While farmers plow beneath a smiling sun. ...

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