Missing the Farm
Travis Mossotti
Here's the orchard someone else will tend to.
And the crawl space beneath the porch
of the house where someone else's barn cat
will slumber through the summer nights
dreaming of long-tailed mice in the high grass.
Over that field, the light dips and refracts
through the broken glass of the muck pond
where a catfish will take someone else's bait
and hook—that it might meet the refined
heat of a skillet. The ghosts of a thousand
head of cattle walk through the woods at night
in someone else's dream while the windows,
cracked slightly, let a mild breeze pass
through the empty rooms like an appraiser.
There is no death that cannot be undone
by simply turning the compost with a pitchfork
or by scattering scratch in the dirt for chickens
who sing each time they lay, but every repair
is only a gesture against the torment of slow
winds and steady rain and heavy sun. It will be
someone else who grows too old to climb
the ladder into the barn's cool loft or the flight
of stairs that lead to and from their own bed.
It will be their hand weighing the mortgage.
It will be their face forgetting its smile. Listen,
if the well pump kicks to life at dawn, it will be
someone else drawing a bath for the last time—
joints relaxing as their form submerges, body
recovering and failing in the same held breath.
from the book APOCRYPHAL GENESIS / Saturnalia Books
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“Missing the Farm” is kind of a portal into a parallel universe where my wife and I got the farm we were after. One where the other buyers didn’t outbid us. The poem is about a specific hundred-year-old cattle farm with an orchard, catfish pond, and red barn full of ancient timber. In retrospect, it seems the poem is indebted to the “The Road Not Taken” by Frost.
 
Black and white photograph of Samuel Beckett
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What Sparks Poetry:
Alina Stefanescu on Language as Form

"Gaps are loud: they announce an absence. I love thinking about how absences are announced. In Wolf's lyric serialism, the fragments reveal their constraints: they recombine to offer a speaker starved of affection or tenderness. The absence is announced through sparsity. Other absences are announced through excess, as in accumulations of descriptions where the accretion reveals that something is missing."
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