A Poem for a Thursday #174

William Notter is from northeastern Colorado. He has had his poetry published in a number of journals and won an award for his book of poetry, Holding Everything Down. Notter has taught writing at the University of Nevada and Grand Valley State University in Michigan. He currently lives in Virginia.

There's never enough of the right kind of rain,
and always too much of what we get.
We've got no need for casinos--
keeping the farm is enough to gamble on.
If the seed doesn't blow out of the ground in December,
the wheat gets laid down flat in the fields by hail
come summer. Spring blizzards get the calves,
and one year my corn was nothing
but rows of stalks from softball-size hail
a month before harvest. That storm ruined my shingles
and beat the siding right off the neighbor's house.

A little hail and wind can't run me off, though,
and I'll keep dropping the well until the aquifer
dries up like they've said it would for years.
We may not know what it's going to leave us with,
but we can see our weather coming.
When those fronts blow across the fields,
trailing dust and rain, we've got time
to get the cars in the shed, and ourselves
into the basement if the clouds are green. 

Next morning I go out to see where the dice fell.
Everything's glazed and bright with the dust knocked off
and the sun barely up. The gravel on the roads
is clean-washed pink, and water hangs 
on the fence wires and the pasture grass.
Sometimes I need to call the county
about a washed-out road, or the insurance man
about a field stripped clean. When I'm lucky
I can shut the irrigation pumps down
for a day or two and give the well a rest. 

I like to drive right into it sometimes
when a storm comes up, lightning arcing
all directions over the hills, and the slate-blue
edge of the front clean as a section line.
There's an instant in that border
where it's not quite clear but not the storm
when everything seems to stop, like my wheels
have left the road. The light turns spooky, dust
just hangs, the grass glows like it's ready
to spark and catch on fire. Then the motor strains,
fat raindrops whack the tin and glass
like the racket from a flock of blackbirds,
hundreds of them scattering off a stubblefield. 

High Plains Farming
William Notter