Fifty years later and at seventy miles
an hour I see a threshing machine on
a hill alongside a highway. Too small,

I think, because in my memory
a threshing machine is as big as a house
belching smoke, filling the air with the noise

of wheels and pulleys, the groan of engines
turning the crashing maelstrom at the heart
of the beast we served when the oats ripened.

The way I remember it, tractors and trucks
revolved like planets around the hub
of the universe, like acolytes to the god

of the harvest who consumed all,
whose hunger was swift and would never
be appeased until field by field the shocks

were lifted into the wagons and brought
in bundles to be flung to the thresher
where the oats were separated from the straw

in golden streams—such a delicate trick,
the parting of kernel and chaff, as in
the end of summer—the end of the world.