WEBVTT

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As some of you know, I'm
interested in getting

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in detaching myself from
some of the poems I write.

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So I experiment with voices in
quite a number of the poems.

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And I'd like to
sort of skip over

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a random, carefully selected
random sampling of voices.

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Beginning with the
first one I worked

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with, namely the 70-year-old
mind of a dirt farmer

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in southeastern Kansas, called,
the farmer called Alvin Turner.

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The poems are set down in
non-chronological order

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as his mind ranges over
some of the events,

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some of the more meaningful
events, I think, of his life.

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I put them into a non
chronological order

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because when I tried
them chronologically,

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it seemed contrived, as if
he had sat down deliberately

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and thought through from
A to Z his life, which

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doesn't seem very real to me.

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So I just let the mind
skip from one to another.

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The poems are simply numbered.

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Number 13.

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I am a dirt farmer
who dreams of poetry.

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Is that so strange?

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Is anything?

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I have bent myself thankfully
over the heat of cowchips.

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When the Lespedeza flowers,
I breathe its blooms.

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The calf I winch to birth grows
legs like oaks to graze on,

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and stuck hogs bleed
for breakfasts.

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This morning at milking, I
kissed the cow's warm flank

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and she kicked the milk
to froth beneath my knees.

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I forgave her, then
cried with the cats.

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Now the manure is in bloom,
thistles defend the driveway,

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and corncobs gird the
mud beneath my boots.

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Plotting harvests, I roam
my acreage like a sweet spy.

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