Farmland

The place I hang my hat is rural, known for hay. I’m from a much bigger city but I’ve never cared for urban life. The barns, fallen outbuildings, open fields, and other features of rural terrain have a calm nostalgia I’m drawn to. Going just outside our little town is like traveling through time or stumbling on a land where time stopped 150 years ago.

Below is a poem called “Farmland” from my new book, The Anonymity of Waiting, which captures some of my reflections on the farmland around my town.

Farmland

On the outskirts of town 
are hayfields and farms.

As I drive past
one furrowed field,
I find another x-ed out by chainlink 
and filled with solar panels.

The hay (or whatever) is gone.

I wonder if horses can eat the 
electricity harvested there.
(Maybe The Electric Horseman
can feed it to his mount).

I would never want to live on a farm
or have my lungs heaving
in the stench of earth and manure
from dawn ‘til dusk.

But I like the farmland;
I like knowing it’s there
with tillers, planter wheels, and combine reels
turning in a slow waltz with the seasons.

I like to pass the outbuildings
with implements piled against their walls
or in the scrub nearby—
a museum of irrigation wheels, hayforks, 
and rust-mottled windrowers.

Most of all, I love the barns,
warped and weatherstripped and, I imagine,
full of hay dust that worked its way into 
the planks, beams, and siding
over generations of harvests

back to when our city was just flotsam: 
buildings bobbing in the grain fields 
that ocean-swelled over the rolling terrain,
horizon to horizon.