THE TURKEY SHOOT
Small town Saskatchewan
raising money for the curling rink
Targets fifty feet away
and old bent-sight 22’s to shoot
The trick to bringing a turkey home
was not how well at the bullseye shot
but how fast you learned that life
is sometimes three inches down
and two to the left of where you aim
November 22, 2017
WATER TO WATER
See the old farmer
sitting by the sea
Born on the prairie
it was water to dust
Dust and dust
and praying for rain
and shovelling snow
and cursing hail
And carrying life
up the hill in a pail
And always trying to get back
TECHNOLOGY
The day breathed in
and the day breathed out
After lunch my father took a nap
– the horses had to rest
By supper time they were fed
fed and brushed and thanked
And then the tractors came
– and tractors do not nap
Not content with that small theft
they soon grew lights and stole the dark
He fed them gas, they pulled the plow
But not once, one to the other
did they ever speak of love
MATH
If a train leaves Moose Jaw
heading west at the speed of first memory
Engine, cars, and caboose
zebraing by behind a snowfence
smoke billowing back over its shoulder
And another leaves, traveling east
from my writing of it now
When will they meet
at the small town of Courval
and your reading of this page
THE AUSTRIAN UNCLES
Already old when I was young
revered as I would hope to be when old
Two brothers married to
two sisters of my father’s father
Great aunts
always as they’ve always been
busily bustling round the house
while the uncles somehow stay
both present and out of the way
Little china cups in work-hard hands
black coffee and home-brew
sipping the day away
SUNSETS
Sunsets are long in these latitudes
and filled with color
The color of sunlight refracting
through soil and seed and dreams
picked up by west winds
and held in suspension
along with prayers
for a good harvest
What it might pay off
and what it might pay
a little something
down on
A little rain brings them
back to earth again
CLEANING THE CALF SHED
Forty below outside
not much warmer
on the inside
A hundred little Herefords
dropping and stepping
where it freezes
where it drops
The calves are
four feet closer
to the roof
by April
After the thaw
sitting on the steel seat
of the little orange Allis
with the front end loader
Driving in hard
and pulling
out
fast
Manuria
in one nostril
spring
in the other
BALING LOVE
When it’s over 90
in July alfalfa gets dry
and blows into the knotter
and the knots won’t stay tied
So you ride on the bouncing back
where each ke-chunk of the plunger
blows chaff in your eye as you search for
loose ends of twine that you finally find
and tie into a new know, with love, or not
Then you
pile them in piles of five
to keep the wet weather at bay
and you pile them any which way
or you pile them with love and pride
pile them right like Frank Lloyd Wright
Hurried by a wind blowing in from Alaska
You handle that same bale again in the fall
tossing it up on the wagon, kneeing it with
bloody knees through thistle-torn jeans, or
an overhand flip with a three-tined fork and
the grace and precision of a pole vault champ
Fourth time you see that bale
you unload that wagon and make a stack
while chaff turns your collar to sandpaper
and you can do it, so when you stand back
you can see every bale fits without a crack
Fifth time you see that bale
it’s winter and maybe forty below
prying frozen cubes out of that stack
where the cattle are waiting, with steam
rising from hot breath and fresh manure
an dyou carefully cut each Ariandne thread
so not even Theseus could follow it back
through their labyrinth of seven stomachs
Next time you see it is in late spring
when four feet of crap in the calf shed has
melted to the bottom and you’re in and out
with the front end loader and the ammonia
clearing a whole winter from your sinuses
And then off to the fields to spread it out and
complete the circle, trying to stay up wind
and as old Bob used to say, “keeping your
mouth open to keep your face clean”
All that to feed your family, and the world
all that with love, or not
THE FARMER
The farmer stands on land so flat
you bend your mind over the end of it
to keep from losing touch with the earth
And he understands the simple honesty
that feeds more than it eats
While a crowded world crowds in
and a crowded sky send siren songs
to lure his young away
THAT HURTS
I step between
the shed door and the baler
Just as my father
looking straight ahead pops the clutch
catching my leg in the too narrow space
between hard steel and hard wood
Hearing a scream
he turns, stops, backs up, and yells
at me for being in the wrong place
I am crushed