He nurses his coffee, by himself most days,
Occasionally with the one or two others
Constituting the bulk of the clientele of the diner
(Low-slung building both faceless and nameless
Although those who remember a day
When the village was at least borderline prosperous
Still refer to it as “Kitty’s Place”,
Though its namesake has been dead and gone some two decades)
One of the few going concerns which implausibly remain,
Seemingly through nothing more than sheer inertia,
In the drab little downtown along Canton Street.

He languishes over his cup for as long as the mood hits him,
There being no discernible reason to hurry
(Indeed, the diner itself, once open before sunrise
Now dark and silent until a leisurely seven-thirty or so)
His place not really a working farm these days,
Just a smattering of beef cattle
(Milking and stripping out more than he can manage now)
And what acreage of corn he can get in the ground.
Eventually, he totters out of the front door,
One sleeve of his shirt rolled and pinned up
(Its former occupying member removed
After the incident with the ancient and malevolent corn binder),
Moving toward his truck with an all-but-one-legged gait,
His left-leg jigsaw-puzzled
By an overturned Farmall some time back
(Most days he reckoned he’d tipped the tractor
By failing to shift his balance to accommodate driving one-armed,
Though if he was in a black enough mood he’d put it down
To an old Iroquois curse placed on the entire St. Lawrence valley.)

One could say, if he was a poet
Or some other **** philosophical fool,
That these partial sacrifices served
To ward off some even more awful finality.
He would have none of that, of course—in his own cosmology
The gods and demons most likely have bigger fish to fry,
And, as to the prospect of some inexorable wreck and ruin,
He is of the opinion that what he was given up to this point
Is both ample and sufficient.

A center stripe on such a road would be no more than affectation,
The prospect of two vehicles on the same stretch of this blacktop
Which ambles from nowhere to nowhere, old logging path
Morphed into a convenience for fishermen or bird watchers
Heading to the odd bits of Adirondack Park land
Scattered higgeldy-piggeldy in its path
All but a mathematical impossibility.
Indeed, the fog lines are barely visible, a series of dots and dashes
Along the crumbling berm of the shoulders,
And the signs testifying to the calamitous curves ahead
Are faded and pock-marked
In testament to generations of pellet-gun marksmanship
And twelve-ounce projectiles.
There remain the odd traces of the byway’s former usefulness:
Rusted blades or unevenly-spoked wheels
Left behind by ancient logging outfits,
The odd abandoned hunting camp, and here and there,
Visible through gaps in thick, ancient stands of pine
(Having outlasted the original settlers and logging concerns
Through the sheer stubborn implacability of biology),
You might see an anomalous abandoned bus up on blocks,
And there are those who have sworn they have seen them
Adorned with curtains in the windows,
But that is most certainly a trick of the light,
A mis-apprehension of something half-glimpsed
By the drivers as they sped by.

I had been, through much of my youth,
Under the care and tutelage of my Uncle Virgil,
He being the sole remainder of my father and his brothers,
The rest taken by life’s wind and wuthering,
Anzio and clogged arteries, sneak attacks and suicides.
The final remnant of my patrimony
(But an anomaly among them,
Squat and blocky where his brothers had been all willowy height,
Bestowed a high reedy voice among a half-dozen baritones)
The one entrusted, due to attrition as well as temperament,
With the shepherding of the family farm
Through another generation
(The original design involved my father taking the reins,
But, though he came to the plowed rows, scrubby old apple trees
And lumpy moguls of the place with the hopes and misigivings
Of a soon-to-be- jilted suitor,
He was a dreamer, a man of little to no pragmatism,
Ill-suited to the grinding and unromantic nature
Of cutting dead cows from stanchions
And bringing order to barbed wire,
The mantle then falling to the youngest brother,
But he proved too easily enveloped in life’s minutiae,
And he departed with a locked garage door and idling engine,
The official version being terminal absentmindedness
While giving his antiquarian Buick a tune-up.)

I had come over to help out with the haying,
Its timing, even by small-farm standards,
Subject to Nature’s whims and caprices,
Process needing to be completed in narrow windows of time
When the tall grasses were just-so dry enough to cut,
Requiring marshaling the forces for attack
At a feverish pace before the next thunderstorm
Marched over the hills and ancient glacial moraines,
Leaving ill-timed efforts all for naught
(My contributions to the cause a hit-and-miss thing,
I being my father’s son after all.)
We’d finished up with some daylight to spare,
A thing to be celebrated,
My uncle and I repairing to the porch for beer and small talk.
In the course of ruminations upon things great and small,
I’d mentioned how I’d changed my considerations
On the ostensibly unchanging hillsides,
How they were once foreboding, claustrophobic things,
Walls to be surmounted like some pine-topped Maginot Line,
But now comforting, benign things,
Cradling me gently, almost imperceptibly yet lovingly.
Uncle Virg took a pull from the bottle and slowly shook his head,
What those hills are, boy, is dirt, just a bunch of **** rock
Ground up by the big ice, and it would have been nice
If they’d made a better job of it,
Not that they gave a tinker’s **** about us then or now.
Son, I listen to you talk, and I despair of you.
Why, what would your father say?
He took another drink, then laughed softly.
Oh, hell, never mind. I know what your father would have said,
We drank more or less in silence after that,
The sun making various sherbert pastels
Of reds and oranges and purples,
Though I thought it perhaps for the best
Not to comment upon that particular phenomenon.

Oh, we’d talked of other lives in other places,
But where would we have gone, anyway?
(It was rural Pennsylvania in the thirties,
And being well-off meant you ate three times most days
And could afford meat every other Sunday)
So we carried on in anguish and guilt as old-maids-in-waiting
As there were dinners to cook and cows to strip out,
Fireplaces to stoke, any number of chores to do
While our mothers and fathers waited patiently for that day
When we would, each in our turn, don a grandmother’s wedding gown
And march steadfastly down some acceptably Protestant aisle
While Gert Bauer, default church organist
Though she was past eighty and nearly blind,
Tortured the wedding march, flubbing notes and stomping pedals
The tune lurching forward at an inconsistent
And unusually adagio fashion.

As it turns out, Tojo and Adolph Schicklgruber
Interceded on our behalf,
For, as the young and able-bodied men of Elk County went off to serve
(Farm boys from Wilcox and Kersey, pool sharps from Ridgway,
Fully half the production line from the paper mill in Johnsonburg)
Someone needed to man punch presses and die casters,
So we were able to find work making propellers
In a windowless and airless factory
Which didn’t have women’s rooms
Until we’d been there for three months
Allowing us to set up house together
(We told our parents
It would allow us to save up toward our weddings,
And still let us give them grocery money each couple of weeks.)
Eventually, Johnny came marching home again
And back into his old job,
Which left us somewhat at sixes and sevens,
But, like Blanche DuBois,
We came to depend on the kindness of strangers
Who believed in the value
Of strong backs or the primacy of civil service scores
And so with our steady if unspectacular incomes,
We were able to carry on keeping house, as it was said,
(Our parents sadly unpacking hope chests.
Sullenly gifting us the linens
They’d purchased for our marital bed at Larson’s,
The hand-made quilt stitched and fussed over
For nine months by Aunt Jenny)
And maintain an uneasy truce with the good people of the town;
Indeed, we were all about “don’t ask, don’t tell”
Long before it was somewhat fashionable.

When it became apparent that she would not carry on much longer,
Or, as she put it, Now I’ve got an expiration date,
Just like a can of soup,
It was as if the populace had decided, after some sixty years,
To take their revenge upon our ******* of the natural order,
As if they were a pack of wolves,
Having identified the lame and the sick among a herd of whitetail,
Tightening the circle before moving in for the ****.  
In truth, I shouldn’t have been surprised,
But the pettiness and the tight, self-satisfied smirks
Were no less painful in spite of that.
And what was your relationship to the deceased?
They would say with their half-knowing, half-offended smiles.
I’d wanted to shout at the top of my lungs that for fully six decades
She had been the love of my life,
Without question and without deviation,
Not like the banker who dallied with his fat secretary,
Or the claims rep who, taking a personal day when her pipes froze up,
******* the plumber right on the kitchen floor,
But years of secrecy and compromise exact a toll,
So I simply, quietly, matter-of-factly would reply
I am the executrix, thank you.

We had talked of perhaps heading west
To make honest women out of each other,
And, later still, of burying her in Paris or San Francisco,
But tight times and walkers and wheelchairs
Made such plans unworkable;
It’s only parchment and granite, she said,
What do they mean at the end of the day, anyhow,
And so when the time came
She asked me to take her ashes up to the top of Bootjack Hill
And scatter her to the wind.
Make sure to go all the way to the top, she insisted,
*I want to get good and clear of this place.

It had, so he recalled, no pretensions of being something
So grand as a lake;
Just a roundish body of water, not particularly suited for diving
Nor of any real attraction to a fisherman,
Nothing there save the odd chub or sunfish to languidly pull one’s line,
Its recreational attributes limited to a postage-stamp size patch of sand
And one solitary rope attached to an equally lonely old truck tire,
Neither being of guaranteed fitness for the task at hand.
He’d gone there for one reason, and one reason only;
There’d been a girl, one late spring and a subsequent early fall,
And at times they’d gone there on the occasional sunny day,
Traversing a twisting two-lane stretch of county road
(The blacktop sprinkled with North Country sandstone,
Giving it the pinkish hue of a rainbow trout
Angrily flopping about on a dock)
In order to get waist-deep in the water for a few minutes
(The pond never really warm enough
To swim in with malice aforethought)
Before settling on blankets to drink cokes
And eat the sandwiches they’d picked up
At the ancient, Mayberry-esque general store just west of town
And to speak in hesitant and uncomfortable half-sentences
Concerning accidents of birth and death, speculative half-made plans.

In the end, it all went no further than talk,
At least after the inevitable transition
From the fleeting, furtive evenings
To the harsh, unremitting light of day.
In truth, he’d always had one eye fixed beyond the horizon,
Beyond the lumbering, lumpy old Adirondack foothills,
Alternately comforting and claustrophobic,
All the time paying heed
To some some whisper, nagging and ethereal,
That all this was simply some momentary way station on the path
To something finer, something substantive, some end of the road;
He’d no way of knowing that the murmur would remain,
Soft yet persistent, long after he’d left that cold cow country,
Rumbling on as the calendar proceeded and the hairline receded.

His work, as it happened, sometimes carried him
To the stark, sparsely populated environs
Situated to the north of the Thruway,
And he would, almost in spite of himself, concoct some excuse
To take himself back out by the old pond,
Still unprepossessing, the same tree sporting the rope-and-tire swing
(Some descendant of the one he had known,
But in the same uneasy state of disrepair),
And, now and then, he’d pull off onto the shoulder,
Leaving the car to walk down by the water’s edge.
On one occasion, he’d had the mad impulse
To dive into the water head-first and fully immerse himself,
And had gone as far as to take off his shirt and tie.
He’d checked himself in the end, of course;
There were any number of water-borne nasties
Courtesy of beavers and Canada geese, most likely leeches as well.
He’d dressed himself, and headed back to the car,
Making a note to himself to remember the hair-pin curve
Just this side of Hannawa Falls, gruesome stretch of road
Which had claimed its share of undergraduates back in his day,
And he’d always thought it sad how many bright futures
Had tumbled over the guardrails and into the ravine
To be held like dark secrets in the underbrush.

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.

Not much happens in these parts, he would demur,
As if he’d be asked in the first place,
He one of the dwindling few remaining in this dwindling town.
Nevertheless, he has seen his share in four score and change years
From the vantage point of his place
Which sits just off the corner of the Penoyer Road:
Boom times and bust,
Snowdrifts threatening to lick the roof lines of houses,
Boys running through the embers of fallen leaves,
Shirtless and barefoot on improbably warm October days,
Young men in hay wagons and rattle-*** Chevy pickups
Laughing and singing, confident and carefree,
Making their way to the old train depot down at Apulia Station
First step on their way to show the jerries or the VC
Exactly how Upstate farm boys took care of business,
Windows adorned by placards with a gold star
Illuminated by a solitary light bulb at odd hours.
Here and there, younger types have begun to dot the landscape:
Professors with a romantic hankering to get back to the land,
Neo-hippies with their own reasons for embracing the rural life,
Each in their tune walking about their yards
Holding keyboarded and wi-fied replicas
Of that which Moses carried down the mountain,
Their fixer-uppers or double-wides adorned with small dishes
Pointed forlornly at the horizon in search of some satellite supplication.
While he has seen enough not to be too ******* sure about things,
He suspects that complexity and contentment
Rarely walk hand-in-hand,
So he keeps his needs simple enough
To be met by the ancient radio
(Huge, wood-cabineted shambling thing,
More attuned for Amos and Andy than All Things Considered)
The three-checkout grocery in Tully,
The Morton-building sheltered family practice over in Cazenovia
(The squalid, sooty skyline of Syracuse,
Split by six lanes of high-octane madness,
As remote and slightly terrifying to him as Mars itself)
As he has learned enough from thickets of trees
Which all but shriek with torrents of crows in September dusks,
The subtle changes of stream banks
Tinged by the stubbornness of frost on early May mornings
Or blanketed by the pig-iron forge heat of July afternoons,
To know that there are sufficient and possibly necessary limits
To the places where two legs or four wheels can carry a body.