Robert Watson
The Museum of Farming Life

There’s no direct bus to the Museum of Farming Life.
You change. It takes time, and a downhill trudge in the mud.
And even then you aren’t there, reports my wife,

whom I sent off alone with some misgiving.
Nobody at the gate, so she walked right in,
and quickly found herself among the living:

Phenomenal Ben the Quantum Horse, who appears
in the field, here and there, but you never see him moving:
a work of many hands, and twitching ears.

Angus the Eponymous Cow, who is, alas,
fully meat for death, and doesn’t mind –
a body tending to rest in springy grass.

Passivity Pam, black-stocking grandma lamb,
staring boredom up into your face
as if she really couldn’t give a damn.

Pigs devoid of names or conscious troubles.
Socket-nosed and overfed, they sleep
like a pulsing vat of greasy pinkish bubbles.

Such a disappointment to my wife!
Patronizing tombstones of a farm,
a festival of rot and rust, not life.

These animals were only sown to reap.
The livestock-auction sign next door read “Gentle-
men.” Did she belong where life’s so cheap?

She could have bought a cow with the coins in her purse,
the bus-fare that was meant to take her home
to where the Derry road turns for the worse,

where history gives way to compost, yields
to broken synclines of an ancient age.
She could have walked it through untended fields,

these days when the light stays good so late. It would give
assent by nodding in the harness to
a promised place they might begin to live.

<< return to the Table of Contents for New Series #10: Winter 2020, Volume 5 Number 2