Craig Planting

— For David Shevin, in loving memory I will find myself waist deep in high summer grass. The humming shock of the golden light. And I will hear them before I see them and know right away who is bounding across the field to meet me. All my good dogs will come then, their wet noses bumping against my palms, their hot panting, their rough faithful tongues. Their eyes young and shiny again. The wiry scruff of their fur, the unspeakable softness of their bellies, their velvet ears against my cheeks.

Driving north from Wichita, Kansas, toward Salina on a warm day last October, I saw an oil-well pump sitting in the middle of a sorghum field. And not just one. As I drove, I saw hundreds more, maybe thousands, all surrounded by amber waves of grain. Like giant, insatiable gulls, they bobbed their heads up and down, up and down, gulping black crude from the earth’s depths. Oil wells in farm fields.