I load my own shells and have a suitcase of pressed cardboard. Naturally I'm poor and picturesque. My father is dead and doesn't care if his vault leaks, that his casket is cheap, his son a poet and a liar. All the honest farmers in my family's past are watching me through the barn slats, from the corncrib and hogpen. Ghosts demand more than wives & teachers. I'll make a "V" of my two books and plow a furrow in the garden. And I want to judge the poetry table at the County Fair. A new form, poems stacked in pyramids like prize potatoes. This county agent of poetry will tell poets, "More potash & nitrogen, the rows are crooked and the field limp, depleted." |