Forrest Pritchard's Blog, page 7

Farm Poem #13

Soft, the snow of blossoms

Petaling the walkway,

The wake of a wedding train

Purling the soldier course,

Color, forsythian fireworks,

Redbuds frothy, raspberry frappe

Bronchioles of lilac

Sighing scent

Dogwood baby’s breath

In the foreground afterthought

And there, bifurcated gardeners,

Cattle tearing the soil

In great calamitous chunks,

Dirt-eaters, stone-lickers,

Rooting their skulls against

The raw ground

Until their faces grow masked

With slick clay,

Bacchanal, fierce, eruptive,

Pawing pasture to pieces

Scraped skyward only to fall

On spines, scapulae,

Raising their tails,

Jetting fecund streams of

Feces, flung far,

As far as far,

Splattering and splashing

Leaves and grass,

Ignoring the flowers

And gorging instead

On violets, dandelions,

Garlic mustard with

Phosphorescent blossoms,

Lessons their mothers taught

Them long ago about,

What, precisely, was what.

How now, apple cow?

Farm Poem #12

“See,” I say excitedly,

Observing it myself

For the first time,

“That pear is pear-shaped!”

It’s April, and wild pears are

Burst into blossom—

Corpulently conical,

Sveltely plump—

Ovoid and, devoid of negative space,

As perfectly pearish as their fruit.

She can’t see it, however.

“You mean the trees?” she asks,

Seeing through the flowers

To the barely visible trunks and limbs.

But I can’t know this. So we go,

Back and forth to Culpeper,

So close to communicating.

It’s only when I demonstrably

Gesture the form into shape

That her eyes ignite with understanding.

It’s no surprise, then, is it,

When, working old floor boards

A week later, I ask her for

The digging iron, or pry bar,

—appellations via applications—

And she responds by saying,

“Oh, you mean the big nail!”

I’m instantly smitten,

Charmed—

For it is a big nail,

And for the first time

I see it too;

See how I didn’t

See it before,

See how I couldn’t;

See, as I am able,

How much is

Boldly hiding

In the bright blue light

Of a spring afternoon.

Farm Poem #11

Ovid tells the story of Cyparissus,

A boy who carelessly killed his beloved

Stag and, heartbroken by its death,

Mourned himself into a cypress.

I, too, was that child at age nine,

Extracting an arrow from a guinea fowl

Which, moments earlier, had been cackling

Warnings from a walnut branch.

If I could have metamorphosed into wood

I would have; believing—not believing—

The arrow would penetrate;

I scrubbed the bloody shaft against the dark soil,

And confessed, the instant my parents arrived home,

My shame. So when I heard, thirty-five years later

That our prized ram had been gut-shot,

Twenty yards from a neighboring deer-stand,

A slow death, hooves carving

Figure eights in the dusty loam,

I thought of a boy in a tree,

His finger on the trigger as the ram grazed near,

Nearer, wondering what happens next,

Wondering, how the entry wound could

Be as small as a thumbnail, innocuous,

Yet the exit the width of his fist;

Wondering, when the light faded matte

In the white ram’s eyes, unblinking,

How he might grieve his way, forever,

Into the closest, deepest, blackest woods.

Farm Poem #10

We notice the obvious,

Ostentatious: the seam in the beam

In the barn is flagitiously askew,

Nine hundred pounds of hanging death.

That’ll get our attention!

On a farm where we patch it and prop it,

Forever a rend to mend,

We’ll fix it, yes—lest two centuries

Of brick and mortar and timber

Come rumbling tumbling down. Naturally.

To build up, however, we must

Build down. We dig.

Manure, more manure, manure more,

Clay, stones, subsoil, where, near bottom,

The shovel tinks a single glassy note

And in the shadows I spy the bottle,

Buried how long, this deep,

Below the sun, the frost-line, our

Reasonable expectations?

Hold it against the sky.

Oh, bottle! We know you instantly.

Corked with corrosion,

Filled with murky liquid,

While others speculate

—Is it bromide? Whiskey? Iodine?—

We don’t have to guess;

We’ve been waiting to pay attention,

Distracted entire lifetimes,

Promised that this jewel,

If properly polished,

Will perfume the air with smoke, and

Someday soon, someday will at last arrive.

Farm Poem #9

Not far from the farm is a monastery of Cistercians

Where, as a seventh grader,

I attended a series of Civil War lectures

Curated by Brother James,

A white monk gray in my memory.

Coarse cotton-smocked, he lead us up

A narrow staircase smelling of

Stone and lichen and spiders and shadows,

Into archived ecumenica where, surprising the senses,

Blue burst through the beveled windows,

Illuminating. Forgive me, father, for I have

Forgotten everything, save the unforgettable;

Scores of shelves with thousands of books,

Spines bearing heavy titles, like the graves

Of seven hundred soldiers buried just beyond;

Yet, more fascinating to me than the bones of dead teenagers,

Men drowning one another in the waist-deep Shenandoah,

Guerrillas exacting flaming sabotage, explosions, mayhem,

Were these profoundly anonymous books. Fixated,

I reasoned a day must arrive in adulthood when

All books are read. The sheer volume—

There was a physical obligation. I felt it.

The monk spoke, but behind him, silence.

I plunged past hypothesis and thesis, headlong into law.

Junior high and monasteries are good places for laws!

The loss, then, more impactful when

In college, from a distance, I witnessed professor

Thomas Disch stumbling sun-blind down the steps

Of Tucker Hall, the English Department,

Bewildered beneath the bowered beech,

This bear-man, broader and taller than I’ll ever be,

Who seized my shoulder and, epistemologically-stunned,

Pressed as though I could bear his weight, confessed,

“Do you realize, with all the books already written

Good books, worthy books, books we wish we could read,

Not counting all the ones we don’t care about,

Not counting what’s to come,

Right now—right now!—there are too many great ones

Than we could ever read in a lifetime?”

Saying this, his eyes appeared to clear,

And I sensed he saw me for the first time.

The great paw of heft that had been driving me

Straight through the pavers and into some Colonial

Science fiction lifted, and he blinked twice, and departed.

When was this time? What was this moment?

Why, a lifetime later, stopped at a railroad crossing along

Some distant back country road, the clattering cargo of

Thousands of tons passing before us, do we think of

Anna Karenina five thousand miles and a century removed,

Consumed one hot July week in high school, but we can’t recall the plot lines?

Why does this great volume forever move through us,

Grayscaled from the wash of memory,

And climbing the steps to bed one evening,

Just before sleep, we suffer the unraveling tragedy of

Not having read it all, remembered it all, felt it all?

Farm Poem #8

Spring is never as we remember it:

Too soon, too hot, too dry, too cold —

Forgetting that the earth wobbles,

What sort of spring do we seek?

The one we’re convinced we recall

Twenty years ago when

The smell of fresh cut grass

Daydreamed itself through the parted window

And into pre-Algebra,

Two fifteen in the afternoon;

Then, when the arrival of spring meant

One day beneath the cold flat stone

The salamanders weren’t there,

But the next, beautifully, they were.

Farm Poem #7

The four year old, I am told,

Has been playing Farmer Forrest—

And Farmer Forrest is always in trouble.

Look! The cow is in the road.

Look! The pig is in the pasture.

Plastic figurines are hastily assembled,

The Fischer Price Farm Patrol scrambled

To the henhouse,

The meadow,

The roof of the barn, where,

Look!

In search of a perch,

The goat is on the weathervane,

In desperate need of assistants.

For non-toy farmers there are other troubles,

Matters of money & failure &

Family & temperament &

Chemistry & finance &

Relationships & interest &

Depression & false optimism &

Globalization & neighbors &

Pricing & health insurance &

Fair wages & injury &

Legal fees & sustainability &

Mechanization & maintenance &

Doubt,

All before dawn,

All before the weather forecast,

Or coffee, or waking,

Or sleep for that matter.

Still, a plastic figurine,

With a plastic straw hat,

Painted-on overalls,

Is plunked on a pinkie

And conjured to life

With troubles of its own.

Problems are problems, after all.

Many miles away,

At the caffeine shop in town,

The mother asks her daughter,

“What does the cow say?”

“Moo!”

“Good! And what does the hen say?”

“Cluck!”

“Yes! And what does the piggy say?”

“Oink, oink, oink!”

So energetic! So willing!

Yet this list will run on,

Run out, before anyone will ever ask,

“What does the farmer say?”

Because none of us know;

None of us knows to ask—

Discarded on the floor,

Surrounded by enormous chickens,

Diminutive cattle,

A flock of proportionate lambs at scale,

Farmer Forrest’s expression is laser-etched,

A black line bemused,

Something intended as a smile.

What does the farmer say?

Something intended as a smile.

Then, look!

Trouble.

Farm Poem #6

So certain, this world

Filled with experts:

Instant analysis

When no one knows for sure why we sleep!

In the pasture,

Parted by tire gouges,

The soil sets about repairing itself,

Twin sutures healing while no one looks.

So sure! Doctors and lawyers and such–

Yet from the stone stable I see the boy,

Dead one hundred fifty years,

Watching for Confederate soldiers.

The sea washes over the sea;

The wind starts where?

No Icarus, these birds,

Who survey their winging breadth of sky.

Farm Poem #5

Old dead apple tree

“It’s sad,” he said gravely, gesturing. “What will you do?”

“You mean the apple trees?” I replied. “They’re dead.”

He nodded. “But still.” He shook his head. “You should do something.”

“Like, perform mouth-to-twig resuscitation?”

He ignored this. “Do you plan to replant them? The fields just look…

I don’t know. So vacant.”

And the cattleman in me wants to ask this

Economist if he plans to help;

For if he doesn’t know the first thing about apples

Then I don’t know the second,

No more than the serpent understood gravity,

Or Newton original sin.

“But still,” he repeats, his eyes far away,

“It’s sad. Just letting them die like that.”

And beyond the tangle of black limbs and

Bracken, creeper snaking through poison ivy,

Rose hips thorning hackberry bark,

Bloated branches of fire smut,

Trunks cankered and split, punked hollow,

My eyes fly far, too,

Past all resemblance of what it meant

–economically, ecologically, energetically–

To keep this old orchard orcharding,

And I see his blue sky, bold, unmarred,

Where silver dream-liners soar

Turbulence-free to tropical destinations,

Cocktails served at thirty five thousand feet,

Views unimpeded.

I see people, and more people.

I see their foreground,

And I see their distance,

And I am not afraid.

Farm Poem #4

Lookout, sunshine!

 

On a farm there’s no spring break,

Instead, a spring bend:

Mountain twigs ice-tipped melting

Into rivulets,

Into rivers.

Richard Feynman said

Fire is sequestered sunlight

Released. Stretching,

These story arcs

Are seasonless.

Where does winter go?

Into stones and bones

Deep beneath the earth.

To the other side!

Where everyone wants to go

Until we don’t;

Until we return.