Homer Noble Farm

Homer Noble Farm

I heard uncle Homer never bought what he could make
and he could make about anything.
The pipeline from the spring was a wooden trough
as were the eve spouts on the house.
Every bent nail was straightened.
Nothing was waste.

In his way, Homer Noble was a poet.
A poet of sparsity, words
pondered over and spent like saved change.
The bare kitchen, floors scrubbed,
glass clear to catch all the daylight
woodstove near the center.
Fine cut maple split to size,
small for a quick hot fire,
whole for a baking.

The farmer and the poet worked the same land,
Frost in his cabin with words
of bitter irony and Noble running
the farm on the slant of light
across the field and the tough, clever hands,
making do.

Taking Down Barns

Taking Down Barns

We took down the barn at Homer Noble’s farm.
It was a large post’n beam, falling in
with stuff from another life strewn like garbage.

Mack’s old pick-up pulled out the center beam,
cracking the hand-made pegs, tumbling swallow’s
nests. In the settling dust we worked,
snaking out rough-sawed beams like trees from the forest.

There were horse harnesses, of rotted leather
and great rounded collars. I found a tin basin.
It wore the name Blueberry, after a horse
I imagined as a roan or dapple grey, working
his life out on the slanted fields in the 1940’s light.

We saved the tin from the roof and made our stairway of beams
and our flatlander friends referred to it as the Robert Frost Memorial stairway.
They filled the hole and from the foundation, made
a stone wall straight across to park the visitors.

There’s a plowshare at the edge of my garden and a
wind chime made of farm implements. It clangs like
ghosts singing, rusty. Reverently we stood in the dim stalls
as though to say a grace before we gleaned
and it was gone.