An academic poetician friend
while discussing my
rural adventures
tells me that he hopes I won't fall victim
to the endemic poematosis of the region, by which, as he explains,
he means the writing
of 'barnyard revelation poems'.
I haven't laughed so much in years.
I suppose, instead, I should be producing
postmodern supermarket odes, or linguo-spatiological
poematographs of the
secret life of words - the kinds of things
a close analysis of 'intimate' might intimate, or the way
'impact' can become 'impacted' - as if
the post-modern supermarket were anything much other than
sawn-up, mashed, sliced, bottled or deep-
frozen barnyard
or the forms and paraforms, the traces and
fathomless abysses of words were any more
than the cum- and pain- and joy-cries
of farmers and their
wives and children, burried under
layer upon layer of the tangled Western Mind.
Somewhere in my childhood
I am walking past
horse-pens on a dirt road,
the scent of the horses
mingling with the scent of grass
and late-summer dust.
I am barely tall enough
to see over the top rail
of the pine-offcut fence.
The horses drink
slowly at their trough.
A brown rooster
with gold
feathers in his tail
pecks in the dirt, while an old
dog sleeps peacefully
under a broken cart.
No-one will call my name
for a half hour yet.
The world
is as big as my eyes.