The Farm

By David Lee b. 1944 David Lee

We sold it. To a man

who would be a patriarch.

I told John we were closed in,

subdivisions and trailers all around,

complaints of the smell (though

there was none), Ira came out

and told me to keep them fenced

(though none broke out), the neighbors

frightened because someone’s cousin’s

friend heard of a hog

that ate a child who fell in the pen (though

their children rode my sows

at feeding time), because I was tired,

because Jan carried our child and could

no longer help, because she wanted a home.

And the patriarch lost his first crop

to weeds, threw a rod in the tractor,

dug a basement and moved the trailer on

for extra bedrooms, cut the water lines

for a ditch, subdivided the farm

and sold the pigs for sausage. I told John

they were his, they were no longer mine,

I couldn’t be responsible.

The wire connecting our voices was silent

for a moment. “You stupid sonofabitch,” was all

he finally said. “You poor stupid bastard.”

David Lee, “The Farm” from A Legacy of Shadows. Copyright © 1999 by David Lee. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press.

Source: A Legacy of Shadows (Copper Canyon Press, 1999)

Biography

Born in west Texas, David Lee is the author of numerous poetry collections, including The Porcine Legacy (1974), Driving and Drinking (1979), The Porcine Canticles (1984), Wayburne Pig (1997), News from Down to the Café: New Poems (1999), and A Legacy of Shadows: Selected Poems (1999). Lee has been a boxer, pig farmer, seminary student, cotton mill worker, and the only white baseball player for a Negro League team. He received a . . .

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