Sunday Poem

LONG WINTER FARM


You’ve got to get to the country. The fields are empty 

as if all farmhands have the clap. The trees have taken 

off their fatigues yet no one’s wives rise to shoo 

their houseplants out for exercise. Acne-scarred planets 

are light years, soufflé years away, but toddlers 

with twig pistols guard the cisterns. I’ve met albino elves 

who harvest the guano smokebats leave in my lungs. 

I suction-cupped a Baby On-board sign in the rear 

window of a hearse. Clouds suck sun-sheen off the rocks. 

I’ve a mound of creased choir gowns that need irony. 

My favourite dog’s buried in the yard. She was dead 

but she got better. Now I have a Mennonite’s fear 

of the automobile. A raven puts on his soot and goes 

to work the warmth from my algebra. Most guys in these parts 

grow a goatee even though it’s cattle country. Come on 

to the country, there’s still seats in the nosebleeds. It’s like living 

below a dam built during budget cuts, loving a geography this much. 

Why must this landscape look like luggage left unattended 

in an airport to get our attention? Any resemblance 

is purely reciprocal. I have an ex who’s on the run in Mexico, 

or who has the runs in Mexico, or who is running Mexico.   

I don’t know, is her hair art or a gaslamp mishap perhaps? 

My dog and I were like two peas in an escape pod. 

When cattle rose from those valleys, cankles in frost shackles, 

I watched silent films with my eyes shut. My biggest mistake 

was wearing white jeans to Rib Fest, but it’s for fun 

us waxwings set controls for the heart of the sun. 

Get thee to the country. I've fletched every sparrow in this war. 

Our ash-eyed cremators have decided all’s lost and paused   

their little holocausts. The mollusks shushed. 

When the killswitch sun kicks on you can watch 

the lunar rogues beeline into miles of turnstile trees, trees 

belching out birds like a salesforce at the brink of banking hours. 

Sucked in at dusk the way a rainbow sucks back 

into an only child. Each tree the scale model of a skyproof roof 

giving up its life goals. Each tree a little town like Jonestown. 

I’ve used a mirror to repel myself down the mountain to these trees. 

Break one’s wrist and you’re an arborist. Each night the police chief 

sings my alibis as lullabies to his sweet niece. Anyway, 

there's a dog over there. I've got to go. Come, 

come tend to me, I tend to disagree with victory. 

If there was a book about Long Winter Farm 

it would begin, A river is always too curious of its end.

From Long Winter Farm, a broadside (Odourless Press, 2013) by Jeramy Dodds 

("Saturday Safari" by Osamu Yokonami)