Neither the day nor the hour

What with the sun silhouetting them and
corn fence-post high it's near impossible
to tell from two fields away man from
woman from scarecrow. Though I can make out
the lack of outstretched limb on two unmoved
adult trunks, their oddly-close position –
one scares north, the other unflinching west –
betrays, as indeed they are scarecrows, an
obsessively protective farmer. Strange,
too, how today the sun sets exactly
between them. I'd like to imagine that
the farmer stood, years ago, where I stand
now, his index finger and thumb raised as
a digital sextant to calculate
the precise alignment of today's end.