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 bam 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."
