Sometimes a whole farm family comes awake
in a close dark place over a motor's hum
to find their farm's been rolled up like a rug
with them inside it. They will be shaken onto
the streets of Cincinnati, Dayton, or Detroit.
It's a ring, a syndicate dismantling farms
on dark nights, filing their serial numbers
smooth, smuggling them north like stolen cars,
disposing of them part by stolen part.
Parts of farms turn up in unlikely places:
weathered gray boards from a Tennessee burley tobacco
barn are up against the wall of an Ohio
office building, lending a rustic effect.
A Tennessee country church suddenly appeared
disguised as a storefront in downtown Chicago.
Traces of Tennessee farms are found on the slopes
of songs written in Bakersfield, California.
One missing farm was found intact at the head
of a falling creek in a recently published short story.
One farm that disappeared without a clue
has turned up in the colorful folk expressions
of a state university building and grounds custodian.
A whole farm was found in the face of Miss Hattie Johnson,
lodged in a Michigan convalescent home.
Soil samples taken from the fingernails
of Ford plant workers in a subdivision
near Nashville match those of several farms
which recently disappeared in the eastern end of the state.
A seventy-acre farm that came to light
in the dream of a graduate student taking part
in a Chicago-based dream research project
has been put on a micro-card for safekeeping.
Divers searching for a stolen car
on the floor of an Army Corps of Engineers
impoundment, discovered a roadbed, a silo, a watering
trough, and the foundations of a dairy barn.
Efforts to raise the farm proved unsuccessful.
A number of small Tennessee farms were traced
to a land-developer's safe deposit box
in a mid-state bank after a bank official
entered the vault to investigate roosters
crowing and cows bawling inside the box.
The Agriculture Agency of the state
recently procured a helicopter to aid
in the disappearing farm phenomenon.
"People come in here every week," the agency head,
Claude Bullock, reports, "whole farm families on tractors,
claiming their small farm has disappeared."
Running the Small Farms arms of the agency
is not just a job for Bullock, born and brought up
on a small Tennessee farm himself. "We're doing
the best we can," says Bullock, a softspoken man
with a brow that furrows like a well-plowed field
over blue eyes looking at you like farm ponds.
"But nowadays," he adds, "you can load a farm,
especially these small ones, onto a floppy disk.
Some of these will hold half a dozen farms. You just store
them away.
So they're hard to locate with a helicopter."
Bullock's own small farm, a thirty-acre
remnant of the "old home place," disappeared
fourteen months ago, shortly before
he joined the Small Farms arm of the agency.
Jim Wayne Miller
Kentucky Poet Laureate
This is such a great poem ! It had me laughing, frowning, I had a tear in my eye.!
More I want more !
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