Little Girl Lost

Sheaves of corn under an infinite sky:
Desire forms that endless way for you.
The isolated circumstance of dating and dance
seems so simple and so perfect too,
Not everything can be singled out.
You wear a gold earring as a reminder
what it is to be a startling woman
in a plain-spoken world.
Up late, past the bedtime of the eastern kings:
The stability of a rectangular parlor,
Marriage should hold, sanity, and even love
like a quaint painting in a dusted frame.
What reminder there is of love is found in spring
then birth and rebirth runs the farm as much as men.
The county fair out on a squared field
designated for pies, pigs, pigtails and the arcing of the sun.
The engines throttle so but not those of state:
Did you ever swing out beneath the trees,
Lifting your spirit high and higher?
Apron tossed aside, dress askew,
Mimicking the motion of the overruling sun.
You must have seen children,
A man dreaming in a cocoon,
The future about to spread its overarching wings.
We still need to swing, lie out under those unfenced skies
to know what is, what isn’t, and what just might be.
Far above the rectangular states drawing out time
and lengthening the neatly polished graves,
I see an urban girl, head turned to one side,
A single earring pierced,
The chiaroscuro of a Vermeer:
The light from the window is such,
She might well be reading the finished script.