Tag: Carmack

Farm Cats

~ johnbrandall

The star that exploded was way too dim. I became nothing but gravity but then I knew my soul.

Archery season for deer opens today, halfway through September, freight rail facing a union strike. You gotta get them data together, gotta get them in the same room, negotiate with them, get them on the same page. This data, that data, get them to shake hands.

I left my flip flops somewhere out there, walking around barefoot, grounding. Shards of acorn shells hurt when stuck to my soles but when clean my feet could grip better against the rock face compared to when their were sheathed in flippers.

In a shower with unheated well water. The body adjusts but the portion against which the water feels most cold is the middle of my back, along the spine, so many switches in there, skin the most naked. Need: white paint, pink paint, Naples yellow. Such a solid state of matter, ailing hospital, corrupt politician needs no rehab. You're fine, said the doctor. Get back down to the waterfront and cast that vote.

It's nice to have a little extra light. Cattle swindle, waterfront development. Notes gone the wrong way, jobs buried in the Meadowlands. A cigarette walks into a farmhouse. The metal is loose on the barn. Your teeth are decent tweezers, and other facts you might as well know while you're still human.

Farm Cat reappears. Where time is irrelevant. She's a jumper, bounces around between worlds...


Follow this link for an amalgam of various Farm writings from 2022 and 2023...

Fescue-footed Cow

~ johnbrandall

White-faced cow's got red in it somewhere. Breed two white-faced cows, that's how you get a red one. Some people think Angus meat marbles better, I don't know. Older people said Jerseys or Guernseys were better. To me, you take the skin off the cow, nobody would be able to tell the difference.

There's salt in the feed. They cut it with that or else they'd eat it all at once. It's a protein feed, 20% protein, from the MFA. There's one in Meta, one in Vienna.

Cows can live as long as twenty years. This one here's twelve years old, you can see her belly's getting pretty big. The older cows they call short and solid. Because their teeth get short and square. If a cow has a broken tooth, they call them broken-mouthed cows, and if they have a broken tooth, they're probably old cows. They break a tooth on a rock, eating dirt. When the grass is eaten down to the ground. We keep our grass pretty tall so that won't happen...


A short Farm sketch after talking to Kevin Carmack one morning a few years back...

Goes Away

~ johnbrandall

Where one leak seemed fixed, another springs up.  Well, isn’t that the way it goes?  Stained wood, stained mattress.  Damp kitchen, scary room.

Stove going.  I was in the dirty attic.  Three-legged chairs, canceled checks, dauber nests by the hundred.  I go up there because the attic is my place to intercept the rain that finds its way through the farmhouse’s old, fallible roof.  Like me, the rain keeps returning, keeps coming back to this remote piece of cattle country in the middle of the state.  

A mist rises from the pasture, hangs there like a cloud.  Above, the sky is clear.  There is, thank God, no wind.  It is still.  I can hear nothing but the nothing that is, the nothing that once will be everything.  If you would be so kind as to scatter my ashes here.  If you would allow me to play the part of the sandstone, to let the water through.

The mice are back.  Two traps, old cheese, picked clean.  Leave the droppings where they lay.  Wise rodents.  Re-bait, try again...


A short missive from Farm, from late last year...

The Case of the Missing Steak

~ johnbrandall

But then a second Yoakum brother paid a visit.  This was Junior, the youngest, veteran of the Navy, pulling up the drive in an all-terrain buggy with his wife Ginger in the passenger seat and two hunting dogs in tow.  

I had never met Jr before.  He lives not far away.  We got to talking.  He had some questions for me.  He wanted to know about the house.  Does it have running water?  Yes, I said, but the toilet is not currently hooked up.  Is there any air conditioning, a window unit? asked Ginger.  Negative on that.  Just a box fan, I said.  

Jr remarked on the clearing I’ve been working on these last few years.  He even noted how the shed had been cleaned up, part of it anyway.  He had memories of Willy Lee, who lived in this house in the middle of the last century, who farmed this land.  Jr identified that big hulk of rusting metal in the pasture near the barn as a wheat combine.  A thresher.  My mom’s dad was a wheat farmer, he would have known that hunk of rust was a thresher.  On a recent visit, my uncle Vernon had alerted me to an article outlining the history of my grandfather's threshing circle in the Okawville Times.  I wondered about the viability of growing wheat on this rocky terrain but I guess old Willy Lee had it figured out well enough...


Click on this link to read the full story...

A Farmhouse Almanac

~ johnbrandall

Today was mowing.  Hours of mowing the grass surrounding this old farmhouse.  After timely rain all summer the ground has dried out as September lurches on, dateline Traderight, Missouri.

I arrived here late this morning, some dew still in the grass, the moisture bad for mowing.  But that was fine because first priority was to get the well’s jet pump working better.  When I left here two weeks ago the water was running but the pump would not reach its cut-out pressure; it would not kick off.  A pump can’t run like that.  If it does, it’ll burn itself out...  

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The Only Bluff in Iberia

~ johnbrandall

Farm Party prep gone awry

Rain,
Light rain tonight,
Missouri farm.
After the neighbors have helped,
After they have asked after us
Who are growing up here
Six days a year.

Mice droppings on divan.
Recluse on back porch, ghost-brown.
Dust and dauber carcasse.
Somehow the lights still work.
Weeds, stickers, tag-alongs.
Jimson weed and bramble...

Full poem...

Farm Draft

~ johnbrandall

Every car and truck that could've passed us has done so by now.  Oh wait, here's a couple more.  I will need to make a stop for gas; the tank is about a third full.  I'll stop in Vienna or maybe at that gas station along the jog at 133 and 42.  Two choppers appear, now three.  Low.  Military.  Black and grey.  A fourth.  The Cards and Nats are knotted at two after six innings.  Where are those choppers going?

Bob's Gasoline Alley.  Old filling station signs and alpacas.  Vacuum Museum, exit 195.  This semi I'm tailing is going a little slow but sitting content in its draft takes all of the decision work out of driving, a relief and a condition necessary to the drafting of this travelogue.


Click here for the full account