“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,
The Super Bowl was trotted out yet again last week, an event that would have entirely escaped my attention if it hadn’t been for an agricultural brouhaha surrounding a Bud Light commercial. Forgive me for not actually seeing the commercial in real time, or even going back and watching it after the fact; I spared myself this optical indigestion by hearing it blared through the headlines.
From what I’ve been able to decipher, Bud Light aired an ad pushing against corn syrup, and America’s grain farmers–who were all ears–took umbrage. Turns out this country ain’t big enough for two golden nostrums! Of course a social media showdown quickly ensued (cue bow-legged lobbyists flourishing limp-wristed pistols at the Not-OK-Corral). Trigger fingers were triggered! Tweets were fired! Facebookers liked/didn’t like certain posts! In short, it was another 45 minute news cycle.
Here’s my world-weary take on it:
Farm Poem #3
Bud Light is at war with agribusiness,
A super bowl of big mouths:
King Corn versus the King of Beers,
Where farmers score points by
Pouring soil down the sink.
How fitting, a battle down the tubes,
On the tubes, in our tubes–
Nostalgic as milk and Cheerios,
But different.
No! The same!
Take your bowl of beer and grain
And slurp it up your corn hole.
Dilly dilly, silly!
We are what you eat.
Kings are always
The first to inform us
There can only be
One king.
Farming is commonly the stressor and the therapy both at once. Some crazy job! The trick, of course, is being grateful for the good, and maintaining healthy perspective regarding the not-so-good. Again, quite a task; for me, writing helps. Here’s an example:
Farm Poem 2
To our lady of broken boards,
Saints of rotted fence posts,
Guardian angels of leaking barn roofs;
To ghosts of harvests failed,
Shades of pastures paltry,
Spirits of humus future;
To the Jesus of bent nails,
Buddha of clogged filters,
Vishnu of dead batteries,
We leave our skin, scraped and torn,
Our palms, our knuckles—
To DJs of dubious country lyrics,
Pink cammoed confederates,
Dating sites of bucolic animosity;
To two-star Yelp reviewers of February eggs,
Arugula-shaming Facebookies,
Instagrammers of self-anointed pulchritude;
To politicians feckless and infecund,
Thirty-nine cent turkey hucksters,
Fuelers and feeders who gaslight fooders;
Our self-righteous indifference hard-won,
We leave a thousand mile stare—
To petri-petro-burger enablers,
Vegan bacon warriors,
Flexitarians of prodigious fluctuations;
To lines eternal at Chick-fil-A,
Invisaligned teeth ribboned with flesh,
Mouths stretch-stuffed with white feathers;
To daydream dreamers of perfect sleeps;
Nightmare-sleepers of Saturday nights;
Lucid dreams of re-dreamed workdays;
We leave the numbers of our therapists—
Talking our way to stillness, dollars forever well-spent—
And to carrots cosmically entwined,
Baler twine torqued into pristine knots,
Stars dropped like matches from midnight skies;
To fragrantly seasoned firewood,
Broken-in brown coats,
6,000 hour tractors;
To dogs mostly good,
Milk-eyed barn cats,
The goat that talked us out of goats;
To exes of inestimable patience,
Spouses and partners of inestimable patience,
Future lovers of inestimable patience,
We leave heart-shaped stones,
Unpocketed haphazard on the hearth,
Plucked fresh from the tilth
Where soil, once clinging, crumbles.