Issue 3
2010
$11.95

Farm Portrait

Just luck the photograph survives, its edges attic beiged, another paper record of what was passing
                        from us
the second it was set down. This was right before the war, a photographer offering aerial pictures of
                        all the farms


in the county, leaning out of a biplane with a large-format camera, trying to visualize the plat map
                        from the courthouse stacks
and relate it to the facts on the ground. It must have been at the end of dusting season, the rows
                        still distinct


on the white earth, bending gracefully over the land’s contours according to the new ideas on
                        erosion control, all the changes
the farmer’d wrought, the gravel roads and outbuildings, the glassy black surface of the farm pond, a
                        hundred head


of polled Herefords grown market fat on clover and vetch. The print was hand tinted, as though the
                        chemistry of capturing light was opinion
rather than fact and could use correcting. J.B. Caudle Farm in architect’s script. You wouldn’t
                        recognize my grandparents’ place


outside Dresden, Tennessee. Now a supermarket floats in a forty-acre parking lot, the rest of it
                        subdivided
for ranch homes, cut by curbless streets potholed and patched. Turns out it’s easy to undo what
                        we’ve done,


all our improvements erased by improvements. At such a remove everything seems gentle and
                        intended, as though
it can do nothing but last. Beyond the furrows and gridded orchards, however, even from altitude
                        you can just make out


hardwood seedlings the squirrels have sewn outpacing the weeds in a field waiting for the bush hog,
                        the edges taken over
with volunteer hackberry and blunt, shrubby cedars so deeply green the least shadow from a midday
                        cloud turns them black.