Embed Notice

w e w e n t t o s e e t h e p l a c e

in Walterville.
Before we had even seen the house, the neighbor,
a man of some seventy years, bent with woods work,

stopped to chat. "The house isn't much, but the soil
is good. Oh, it has some Scotch broom, I know,
on the pasture, but you can get ahead of that

if you keep after it. I helped the last folks with their fence,
but they wanted the gate right here, where the tractor
couldn't get in. They'd no sense."

We asked why no fence between his place
and "ours." "Oh, I don't need a fence.
Don't want your apples, and you're welcome to mine."

The sort of thing we'd hoped. We walked over
the pasture till we reached the incense cedars,
each one five feet thick, and found a hanging

branch worn smooth by generations of children's swinging.
Good, and the valley here was wide,
with mountains stretching east and west,

and sunshine access on short winter days.
But the house wouldn't do; bedrooms dark
and tiny, with telltale smell throughout

of dry rot underneath. Desire for land
sets one dreaming. One acre, three acres--
not enough to farm, but who can farm

with these prices? It becomes a privilege
just to set out onions, and a cow
is not mere luxury, but even a kind of madness

to consider. We have cross fenced
our high-taxed valleys so that to walk straight
for five minutes can't be done, and all

the while buying our produce from five hundred
miles away, where the tractors have as many
wheels as your freeway rig. I want to put

my hands into the ground and make it yield
enough to make my children grow, and not
grow poor in the process. We drove home,

and quarreled along the way about land,
as people do who have gone to see
not only what they could not have afforded,

but ought not to have desired. The ducks
were glad to see us; she watered them, and I
fed tomatoes, and we kissed and made up,

and lay awake in our small suburban house
beneath the wheeling moon and stars. Why is it,
I wondered then and wonder now, that no one

ever seems to know when they have enough?
When sleep came, there was a vivid dream.
I met again the old man with no fence,

and saw him pointing to the earth. "This
was river bottom in here not too long ago,"
I heard him say. "When we drilled down forty

feet, we hit a driftwood tree, even though
the river now is half a mile away." He opened up
the earth somehow, and showed me the tree,

still caught amid smooth and rounded stones
deep beneath the topsoil, which now I saw
was dark and rich, as he had said it was.

I reached to touch the soil, and awoke.
The northbound train was rumbling by the house,
carrying produce from industrial farms,

and I was drenched in sweat, and found the moon
had drifted far across the window to the west.