The Old Mule

Fall is here, and life on the farm is full of happiness. So much to be done. There is never a moment when all is accomplished, and thus we press ever in to the next and the trick is to be happy in that flowing turn of moments then days into seasons. I just love the fall. I spilled an entire can of irrigation primer on my hand and my skin was the color of pretty leaves, for a little while. I would rather die that way than stumble into a city sewer grate. Maybe that never really happens either.

Here is an excellent poem by a poet I was never too stirred up over. But maybe I need to dust off some books.

--

"Reverie and Invocation" by William Carlos Williams

Whether the rain comes down
or there be sunny days
the sleets of January or the haze
of autumn afternoons, when
we dream of our youth our gaze
grows mellow, wise man or fool,
we were young, the future
beckoned us.

Now we grow old and grey
and all we knew is forgotten
there comes alive in
the ash of today, memory! a god
who revives us! the apple trees
we climbed as a boy
the caress on our necks of
a summer breeze.

Come back and give us
those days when passion drove us
to break every rule.
We weren't bad, but good!
May our preachers find us
the courage still to sin so
and win so! and win so!
a life everlasting.

"Reverie and Invocation" by William Carlos Williams, from Collected Poems. © New Directions, 1962

Fargo
by John Updike

"The fertillest soil this side of the Tigris
and Euphrates"—so the schoolchildren
of the countryside are taught, of their land
flat as a checkerboard to the hem of the sky.
The giant sky, pale green at dusk, stays black
long after morning cow-milking time.
Wind is incessant in winter, so
that snow falls sideways, like arctic sunshine.
...
This land of Lutherans and sugar beets
thickens its marvelous thinness here at the edge
of a Red River whose windings alone
betray the rectilinear. Downtown,
parking space is no problem, and grain-fed health
rewards those God's grandeur does not drive mad.