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.
