The Farm 

The last prospective buyer long ago
drove his pickup out the rutted lane,
where hollow weed-shafts whisper now
in huddled sprigs of drab and brown.
 
The fencerow, rambling high,
with red psychotic tangled briar,
where foot-high yard and pasture
embrace in fierce unholy alliance.
 
Winter winds lay siege,
silencing choirs of elm and maple,
who stare up at their arthritic hands,
empty, occupied with thoughts of cold.
 
The blighted orchard turns away
from the guttered hillside,
runnelled by rains, blasted, warred
by wild, barbaric horses of weather.
 
The cistern floor is dry and cracked
whence warm, dark answers once returned
children's searching voices with
mysteries, rich from cool dark waters.
 
Dressed in weathered clapboard, hung
on massive walls of double plank,
pegged to beams hand hewn by
mennonites a hundred years before -
 
This house where we were born upstairs;
where birth and death and Sunday dinners
filled rooms with stories, blood and family
and wrote, contained and marked our lives.
 
Potroast, hams and shoe-fly-pie
gone from that grand kitchen, ruled once
by blue cast iron stove whose long reign
warmed our bone-cold winter mornings.
 
And the barn. Ah, the great red barn!
Trimmed in white and fluted, portal hex,
burgeoned with the fruits and bounty of
ironbacks' honest moil and pane-clear minds.
 
The bare top-floor, rough-cut planks,
where tons of bales, fresh in hay
rose high to the wood-shingle roof where
sleep and love were made above the beams.
 
No steaming breath from bovine lungs
warm the whitewashed stables now.
Stantions hang like broken hips
angled against the passing light of day.
 
Cats no longer lie in wait
for ambush on the grainery floor,
where wheat, barley, oats and rye
once flowed silken through our hands
 
In the long empty shed
pieces of rakes and spreaders
lay mangled in a gallery of rust
around the wooden watering trough.
 
The hand-pump profiled on the wall,
its' flexed dry fist no longer sucks
water for the cows and horse
out of the old, stone-lined well.
 
Frozen, straw-laced shit
caked dry on oak-plank doors,
where lowing answered to their names
as they came in to drop their milk.
 
Chaff hangs from ceiling webs and
shafts of light stab through cracks of
walls that forgot all their stories.
Seasons pass like christmas without a child.

- Les Blough, 1997

More poetry by Les Blough

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