As some of you know, I'm interested in getting
in detaching myself from some of the poems I write.
So I experiment with voices in quite a number of the poems.
And I'd like to sort of skip over
a random, carefully selected random sampling of voices.
Beginning with the first one I worked
with, namely the 70-year-old mind of a dirt farmer
in southeastern Kansas, called, the farmer called Alvin Turner.
The poems are set down in non-chronological order
as his mind ranges over some of the events,
some of the more meaningful events, I think, of his life.
I put them into a non chronological order
because when I tried them chronologically,
it seemed contrived, as if he had sat down deliberately
and thought through from A to Z his life, which
doesn't seem very real to me.
So I just let the mind skip from one to another.
The poems are simply numbered.
Number 13.
I am a dirt farmer who dreams of poetry.
Is that so strange?
Is anything?
I have bent myself thankfully over the heat of cowchips.
When the Lespedeza flowers, I breathe its blooms.
The calf I winch to birth grows legs like oaks to graze on,
and stuck hogs bleed for breakfasts.
This morning at milking, I kissed the cow's warm flank
and she kicked the milk to froth beneath my knees.
I forgave her, then cried with the cats.
Now the manure is in bloom, thistles defend the driveway,
and corncobs gird the mud beneath my boots.
Plotting harvests, I roam my acreage like a sweet spy.