I’m eating out of a hand that
has fed every other goat on this place.

The choice of a life time:
I was told I could be
mountain or
farm.

To have been a mountain goat!
A life of climbing!
Living on inch-wide
ledges!
Everything above me
to help me fall!  
Tarterous even!
Into unknown abysses.  

But I have always been scared of falling.

If I’d reached the peak,
I would have met
the richest farmers
and their tools that brought them up
for company.

On mountain tops
there are ruthless goats
happy to playfully
ram each other off.

If I was to fall
on that  trodden path
I would take
only ghosts down.

But my view of the farmhouse —
like the painter who uses the sky
as her canvas —
is of ghosts of the flat green woods.

I was free
only when I chose to be
a farmer’s goat.