I have never lived here.   I have never lit a match
here. Home-dipped candles build the walls
by shadowing them, illumination’s fitful and
declares, water runs out of my brows,
my hair. How build a place you’ve never been.
I’m imagining what you’ll say to me, prey
animal, in the future in which I come here. Outside,
the well-worn darkness; shuddering lids.

Someone came to crop up in conversations
that can be native without invading. Kiwis,
josta berries. You were excited. The dream
sprouted a bristling orchard. Going backward
from the hush-hush of oranges and imports, waxy,
smelling like flower store, scandalized
as you sat nourished by these, already going
down the rutted road in mind. To redistribute
sunchokes, groundnuts, see thyme spread
into a yard. Draw up and fork under what
you know. Under careful jade-green plastic carefully
chosen seeds sprout or rot, above them crows
step and peck. The future is stocked with locally
viable species, good reasons as far
as the eye. Woods form a high horizon.

You say farm, I may picture anything. I may
need whole new planets — a remoteness
where the lesson would take, terrace. Long
yellow racemes, teeth, stars of unrelenting
care, mild droppings, twice milking: when it’s all
true sores will open like borders, become precarious.
Goats, alpaca graze between fallen black locust
pods and crabgrass. Slowly with many pauses. Try
to prove anything can exist without you.

Untracked impossibilities shadowed with dropped
twigs, icicles, bark. The very idea of
surrounding empties itself into the feed bins
poses an emptiness farm-shaped in the middle
of everything not farm. Not tending
toward. Everything far. Into which goat cheese
(Do we milk twice a day or let
the babies stay with their mothers?) and apples
from the stooping tree, woody some years, vanish.
Before this relieves you, measure the vectors,
veins, your downwind, their matchless needs.

Clearing the ground of snow to frame the cold. Hot centers
of compost and manure: what to do as temperature.
In the middle of season, the farm is a nugget of darkness.
Even light stops at the posted intervals, detours,
blackbody, gravity, future. The space
station with its terraformed rings, farmers
suited in freefall, farm an inch from skin. Tethered
to blue-green algae, hardy banana, edible
molds. Peaceful with different needs. Any one
of these could drive the farm into space, a light
sprinkle of panic. The only place left. The hope home.

Shade trees, buckets, fullest at
the point of its littlest stream. To get
a place, own it, stake it out. Freehold.
Homestead. Transplant. Rescue. Not
knowing how close, it clings, the smell of home.
Where do you see yourself sitting to count
costs, how does the kitchen spread
out from the table, house from kitchen, farm
from house, floating in dark space between
paper clouds? When a tree blows
over, that tree takes visible root at the farm.
Crows resound in it. Vultures crowd
the pines from out of bounds. They clean
up. They go back. The stricken, the fallen,
there as here. Here as far.