He will allow, if you press him on the point,
That it can be a hard go sometimes;
Holsteins have no concept of weekends, he will say,
Or Christmas, for that matter,
But all that being said
With a smile practically gushing contentment.
He has, for thirty-plus years now,
Worked some four hundred head, dairy and beef
In this cold, flat valley where low-pressure systems come to die,
Bringing the detritus of low clouds and snow flurries in tow,
Sometimes even into the middle of May.  
He is not unaware the outlook for his homestead is hazy, at best;
He has consciously blocked out how much he is into the bank
For feed, the re-built corn silos, the new Case tractor,
And both of his sons have long since fled south,
Preferring the comfort of powerpoint presentations and cubicles
To a cold, dark milking house in the middle of January,
But he has seen the future come and go,
Dwelling in the misbegotten debris of the recent past:
Huge, slightly Fifties-space-movie-flying-saucer satellite dishes
Pointing forlornly directly at the horizon
Outside shuttered and foreclosed upon houses
Which litter any number of the back roads,
The yellowing signs promoting cheap internet access
Taped to windows in small, half-empty strip malls in Gouvernuer,
All cause enough for him to opine at virtually every opportunity
I have seen the future, and I can confirm
That it clearly ain’t what it used to be.

He could have, if he had of a mind to do so, gone in another direction;
Unlike most of the farm kids,
Who were packaged as a unit into the General Ed track,
He’d tested himself into the College Prep classes,
Where several of his teachers made it a point to tell him
Virgil, you need to understand that you’re a bright kid.  
You can do other things, go other places,
And one or two of his instructors were downright offended
That he chose to take over the farm immediately upon graduation,
But he knew at an early age—no, had always known
That he would remain in this place, on this patch of land,
Even though he could not even begin to explain
The whys and wherefores of his decision,
Language being the ungainly
And wholly inadequate instrument that it is
(This is why, he would say every Sunday morning
At breakfast with Gerald Glass and Earl Tiefenauer,
The both of them rolling their eyes in tandem,
Knowing exactly what came next,
The Akwesasnes went hundreds of years without a written language;
They were smart enough to know that all words do
Is just get in the **** way)
But he knew that what was in the gentle, serene chugging,
The rhythmic pop of the ancient machinery
At the  Karsten place over on the Heuvelton Road
Flinging another squared-off hay bale into his jerry-built wagon,
Or in the blue sky which stretched, impossibly cloudless and glorious,
From the St. Lawrence up north down to Fort Drum
And onward for several forevers either way besides,
Was greater and weightier than anything in the cloth-bound red Bibles
Which sat in the pews at the Presbyterian church in Madrid
(Not his father’s church, but the blustering, cocksure Baptists,
Sure as death itself as to the absolute inambiguity of the Word
Were simply not his kind of people)
Which he had begun attending some half-dozen years ago,
Not because he was a particularly spiritual man by any means;
He had simply been unable to sufficiently convince himself
That all of this could happen strictly by accident.

a refugee from Yale, and the stale stench
of old money, he took a job with the park service

where he maintained outhouses,
and got high in the cover of cottonwoods

this crap crew job gave him no
deferment from the draft, so he landed in Can Tho

he didn't clean outhouses there--little people did,
stirring his dreck in burning diesel for 75 cents a day

when his Huey was shot down in the
Mekong, only he and his door gunner survived

they hid, submerged in paddies until dark
hearing faint but ferocious voices of the VC

who never found them--and they made the
miracle mile back to base camp, covered in muck

that smelled like dung; a scent that stuck
with him in dreams, no matter how much he bathed

when he came home, he again labored
for the forest service, and asked for ******* duty

fearing if he lost the smell,
he would lose himself as well






.

It was one of those places which,
We were instructed with stern tones
And the occasional smack to the ****,
That we were not to go,
A place of childhood sing-song
(River man, river man
He’ll sink his teeth right in your can)
And, later, of clandestine beers and smokes,
Or furtive encounters
With steady sweethearts and short-term solutions.
He’d set up something akin to a lean-to
Hard by a reasonably well-sheltered bank,
One wall of rocky dirt, the other comprised of lumber
Which had been abandoned or purloined or somewhere in between,
And if you resided in that narrow niche
Where you were too old to be scared shitless of him,
And too young to dismiss him out of hand,
He was of a mind to accept a bit of company,
Possibly share a bit of somewhat-warm, store-brand soup,
Even a bit of coffee, if you’d developed the taste for it.
He’d been in the merchant marine, or so he claimed,
Driven there by the search for some constancy
He’d never been privy to in a land-locked world,
Figuring the ceaseless expanse of the ocean
And the regularity of shipboard routine the vessel to all that.
He’d been deeply disappointed, of course,
The waters a kaleidoscopic maelstrom of blues, grays, and purples,
Alternately hammock-smooth and Gothic furious,
All in nothing even mildly evocative of the regularity of the seasons,
And so, he intimated, he’d jumped ship in some unglamorous port,
Living on the run (though for how long was an open question,
And the whos and whys of his prospective captors
Not a subject that he nor his listeners were of a mind to broach)
But he’d never quite been able to shake the lure of the water,
And so he’d set up housekeeping by this particular stream,
Convinced the current held some epiphany, some augury
Which occasional suggested but never truly spoke to him
(Can’t trust the water, and can’t trust the land,
And that hain’t left me much ‘n terms of other options,
He was wont to cackle twice or thrice an hour.)
One day, before some of us were of a mind to see him leave,
He was gone, leaving no trace behind,
Perhaps run off by some officious sheriff’s deputy,
Perhaps by his own leave, searching for some river bed
Which spoke more sweetly, more distinctly,
Or perhaps he came to believe there was a third dwelling option
Somewhere on the banks of the jet stream its ownself.