Being Poetry

It’s the beginning of April, day after Fool’s Day, and I’m not that, or maybe I am, and I’m driving down the gravel of McNaught Line, towards my childhood home and all that once was, bag with his gift sitting on seat beside me.

I haven’t called and maybe he's not even home, but I can see laundry flapping on the line, out by the twisted apple tree, across to the lilac bush, bed sheets, cotton and flannel that my Mama didn’t hang out, and then when I'm just past his fenceline, I see him too.

He's walking out across his back lawn towards the shop and his tractors, just the way I’ve seen him walk out cross that barnyard a million times, him in blue coveralls patched, cap pulled low, peak half cocked, and I’m a girl again coming down our road towards home and Mama’s hanging out the wash and he’s my dad, always my dad, always with work boots and hat.

And something scalds me raw inside.

He’s nearly full across the yard, out near the grain bins, when I pull up beside him, cut the engine, roll down the window.

He points his finger, thick and wrinkled, at me. I can feel it coming.

“I have a daughter that looks a lot like you.” That glimmer in his eyes almost gives him away. He pulls my other leg for good measure ... “But, I don’t know.” He winces so genuinely, hemming and hawing. “On the other hand, you look a lot older than her…”

“Hey Dad…” Our eyes smile. His hair, what I can see under his hat, is grey, salt and pepper. When did Dad grow old? And that what he’s thinking of me… us two surprised by reflections of time.

“Brought you a gift.” I reach for the bag, hand it to him through the window.

“Well, it sure is heavy. That’s got to be a good sign.” He’s chuckling, rifling through the tissue paper. I inhale, hold.

“A book?” He lifts out the hefty volume, eyebrows raised too. He and I both know that the written word and him have this long and painfully drawn-out relationship that’s settled into determined avoidance.

"A book about farmers."

I help tear back the shrink wrap, still hopeful. If I open the book up with him…

John Morgan O’Brien and his sons walk a prized steed in a Texas downpour. Carl Ray Sellers has slapped an arm around his life-long buddy Benn Arnold Gleason, old men with old hats in front of old barn. Catarino and Margarita Romero, married for nearly eight decades, sit with their cowboy hats under the hot Texas sun.

Dad’s standing in the farmyard I’ve known my whole life and I’m sitting there behind the van’s steering wheel and this book of honest faces lies through the window, him anchoring one leaf and me the other, a bridge connecting the farmer and the farmer’s daughter and the things we never say.

He nods when I read words of these weather-wore men and women, “ A farmer never has a perfect year but he’s always striving for one.” How many times has Dad said that, him working with land and sky and all the elements, world beyond his control?

I want to grab the camera out of my bag, take a picture of his hands, scabbed and etched with grease, half hanging there out of frayed pocket. But there are things that are his, stories I don't know the endings to, things I can't take pieces of, try to understand. Somethings just are.

He interrupts me when I read, “You better love it because it sure won’t make you rich.”

He’s shaking his head. "I disagree."

I look up into his face lined deep with days. He looks me straight in the eye.

“There are two kinds of wealth.” A constellation of wrinkles spreads across skin darkened with long days in the sun. “And farming makes you the real rich.”

I feel what he knows, and that too of an old rugged Cross. Ache for that for him too. He’s sixty now. I don’t know how that happened.

And when I read, “I was born on this land and I will die on this land,” Dad’s wiping away the feelings all spilling.

I finally close the back cover. Dad haltingly reads the words, “ 'No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.' Booker T. Washington ... "

I smile. “Levi had that quote a few weeks ago in his copywork.” I run my hand over the words. “He had frowned after he read it.” Dad arches eyebrows again.

“So Levi had called Cale and Josh to come read this quote that he was sure was all wrong. And with them hanging over his shoulders, he read it aloud in this voice all-knowing. I stopped peeling carrots and listened, trying to figure out what Levi was taking issue with. Cale and Joshua didn’t get it either.”

“And Levi, brow all knitted up, this disgust in his voice, tunes us in. ‘Well, Booker Washington thinks people can’t do well until they think there’s as much dignity in working in the field as there is writing poetry. But if you are smart at all you know there’s a lot more dignity in fieldwork than in just writing down a poem!' ”

Dad’s laughter fills the still of late afternoon, rings off the barn and shed; he slaps his leg in joy over his grandson with dirt in his blood and me, loving how a line of words can plow a soul, I fall into his happiness too, glad for this moment.

His laughter chokes up into this swell of sentiment.

He points his gnarled finger again. “You tell Levi.” He shakes his finger to punctuate every word.

“You tell that Levi that for real farmers…” He struggles to grab the words in this flood of feelings, “that for me, tilling a field is poetry.”

Dad turns away from me looking straight in to him. He looks away across his fields.

I’ve found a bit of what once was, what is, a bit of all I don't understand. I pick up it up, me still a fool. The feelings that can't find words, that simply do, maybe those are the surest poems, the most noble expressions of all.

And the mystery of all that’s been and will be, and what simply is, I carry that poetry home.

Now has a rhythm of its own.

Photos: from the book American Farmer: The Heart of Our Country


I meant this week to write a poem for L.L.'s prompt, "What is poetry?" but this story found me instead and I took it....


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