Dead Farms in Northern New England by Sydney Lea

Dead Farms in Northern New England

Veinous snapshots of Dad Before He Went Over.
All black and whites, they’ve sat so long on small tables
that sons can’t notice them now. In the dark of their trailers,

in the absence of color, sons will have to imagine
cornsilk’s yellow, gate-columns streaked with marble,
bright galvanized roofs, the glint of reds in fieldstone.

But the sons aren’t a kind to imagine. Their elders chose–
or was it their women?– these farmers’ backdrops: land
and tractor, kitchen garden, wellhead, plow.

Breeze lifts their hair; the soldiers are never indoors.
Each is smoking or holding his favorite brand.
Lucky? Camel? Chesterfield? Who cares?

Say he survived tobacco and bullet and bomb.
Things change, he’s gone. Women as always tend
to laundry and housework. In listing mobile homes,

they make the worlds of absent men go round,
scraping up suppers that too often wait in a pan
on a cold back-burner. I know the uprooted sons:

a few appear to madden themselves with curses
against wife or girlfriend. The sons were in Viet Nam
and are wards now, field-dirt stupid, cursing their nurses.

Murder makes the odd headline. More commonly, beatings.
Was it always like this? Will it be? In their own sons’ heads
will women conspire, will they all be bent on cheating

their partners blind by inscrutable female cunning?
But what can be robbed from such men? Their pickups? Their dead-end
piecework jobs? Their barstools? They’d say, Well, something–

but they aren’t a sort to say something. A world of wars
jets through their veins. In the batterers’ own pictures,
you’ll notice more often than not that they’re carrying arms,

propping their feet on the chest of a kill in autumn.
It’s never a doe, which might leave you bewildered
if you never learned what’s left of deer camp tradition,

sad remnants their boys will inherit. And the women will pour
nurture on all these farmers’ heirs, who’ll hate it
and crave it. Is war the appropriate metaphor?

I could find others no doubt– like seeds who get surfeit
of nourishment, so whose fruit can never quite sweeten.
Extravagant vines will smother or else will turn it

so bitter it leaves the one who tastes it weeping.

Sydney Lea’s latest collection, Here, is published by Four Way Books and available here.

Learn more about Sydney on our Contributors’ Page.

(Photo: Ian Chapin/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)

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Sydney Lea

A former Pulitzer finalist and winner of the Poets’ Prize, Sydney Lea served as founding editor of New England Review and was Vermont’s Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2015.He is the author of twenty-five books: a novel, five volumes of personal and three of critical essays, and sixteen poetry collections, most recently What Shines (Four Way Books, 2023). In 2021, he was presented with his home state of Vermont’s most prestigious artist’s distinction: the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.