The incomer could be explaining any
place whose tenants leave only to buy
poisons they can’t find at home.
The village burns attempts. Its best
days roll on the green all struggling
to get under an inch of the same
blanket at the same time, except
for the day gazing blankly from his stroller.

Someone came to crop up in conversations
that can be native without invading. Kiwis,
josta berries. You were excited. The dream
sprouted a bristling orchard. Going backward
from the hush-hush of oranges and imports, waxy,
smelling like flower store, scandalized
as you sat nourished by these, already going
down the rutted road in mind. To redistribute
sunchokes, groundnuts, see thyme spread
into a yard. Draw up and fork under what
you know. Under careful jade-green plastic carefully
chosen seeds sprout or rot, above them crows
step and peck. The future is stocked with locally
viable species, good reasons as far
as the eye. Woods form a high horizon.

You say farm, I may picture anything. I may
need whole new planets — a remoteness
where the lesson would take, terrace. Long
yellow racemes, teeth, stars of unrelenting
care, mild droppings, twice milking: when it’s all
true sores will open like borders, become precarious.
Goats, alpaca graze between fallen black locust
pods and crabgrass. Slowly with many pauses. Try
to prove anything can exist without you.

Untracked impossibilities shadowed with dropped
twigs, icicles, bark. The very idea of
surrounding empties itself into the feed bins
poses an emptiness farm-shaped in the middle
of everything not farm. Not tending
toward. Everything far. Into which goat cheese
(Do we milk twice a day or let
the babies stay with their mothers?) and apples
from the stooping tree, woody some years, vanish.
Before this relieves you, measure the vectors,
veins, your downwind, their matchless needs.

Clearing the ground of snow to frame the cold. Hot centers
of compost and manure: what to do as temperature.
In the middle of season, the farm is a nugget of darkness.
Even light stops at the posted intervals, detours,
blackbody, gravity, future. The space
station with its terraformed rings, farmers
suited in freefall, farm an inch from skin. Tethered
to blue-green algae, hardy banana, edible
molds. Peaceful with different needs. Any one
of these could drive the farm into space, a light
sprinkle of panic. The only place left. The hope home.

Shade trees, buckets, fullest at
the point of its littlest stream. To get
a place, own it, stake it out. Freehold.
Homestead. Transplant. Rescue. Not
knowing how close, it clings, the smell of home.
Where do you see yourself sitting to count
costs, how does the kitchen spread
out from the table, house from kitchen, farm
from house, floating in dark space between
paper clouds? When a tree blows
over, that tree takes visible root at the farm.
Crows resound in it. Vultures crowd
the pines from out of bounds. They clean
up. They go back. The stricken, the fallen,
there as here. Here as far.

In the pit of the windbreaker, hunger
folds. On the flat, granules of distrust gain
flanked by sun and gravity. Even
the sky overcast. If the field could heave,

hinge up, what points, what hidden
things? — not always treasure
under that wide smile. Statement from
one side, unspeakable from the other.

That the baby survived two
previous rough prolonged
is remarkable. Quick descent
of girlhood, something bright
before you know it. Mischance.
Possible fingersweep. First
inarticulate wails, thin hints.
Sickly for which blame the high
rate of women. Common
lot. Have another. Usually such
work is fatal. Make your
own, a daughter this
time, a grayish patch.

Child aged seven years

and of various durations of sojourn.
The country she’s going to girl in
no traveler’s country, no
return. Stringy hair measures
the pillow. Obedience dangles,
winces. The pitcher mouth
lipped, inviting, beaded. Peroral
bronchoscopic removal.
Cure. No questions asked.

Child aged eight years

Early appearance. Concern. As
she reacts. Less than that
of trauma to inspire
local and mild character, to
watch the littler ones. A sampler,
accumulation of matter. Occupations
open and close to her like old
and new wounds. Little thin
chest, little cavity. Pins
in her bored mouth. Then
she laughed, or spoke.

Girl aged eight years

Old enough to swallow herself
girls seem to be prone
with heads downward. Attention
transfixes across the lumen
her obligations. Chores.
Like on Little House
on the Prairie Sundays
no work as possible
as folded stillness.
Staring. Aged. Enough.
Cure. Inhale one every
year for the rest of your
life. See how you’ve grown.

Child aged twelve years

By this time home is where
a girl is pinned. Metal
affinity. Cross when she’s leaky.
Comparisons of 1, 2, 4, 7, 8
and 9 are interesting as they show
the pathologic — that
is, becoming — of similar female
bodies bound round. Shawled. Burden
bent under, not once, but again.

Woman aged sixty-three years

All expectoration ceases after a few weeks.
The life that led her over
which surgeons leaned like
angels. Chamber of horrors, of
life past the change
they describe from outside.
Years of one branch leading to
another lobe — felt the sun hot on
her wool shoulders and drew
breath. For a stopped instant. What
passed between inhalation
and exhalation but years? Like
walls. Sheared off. Stopped
watching. Run down: what else
was likely to occur
to her? Because the ether,
the air is local, it brings
out other voices, theirs.