Living Your Map from Memory

Kentucky Bluegrass Countryside

Mapping Farmland: 

Memory, Motion, and Time

James Hart

How often as a child I watched as wind

thrashed tempests through seas of grass across

our farm, waves undulating waves of heads and stems,

dizziness shifting me underfoot, so rapt in motion

I’d clutch a roughened hedge post

to dispel imagined seasickness summoned

from a mind out of time with its day.

Driving across Nebraska once I daydreamed

an armada of conestoga wagons pushing westward on tides

of buffalo grass a hundred years before the same

prairies grew miles of wind-hammered wheat, motion

like a god’s arm scything time toward its golden

coast, harvesters pouring showers of grain

into a different brand of waiting wagon.

So many topographic maps a farmer draws

in one lifetime across the surface of earth—the plow

turning up deep folds of black until a field is ribbed in washboard

shadows, clean shining earth turned up to the motion

of birds before the sun dries it dull, the harrow

drags the clods’ hearts apart into one perfect surface,

the planter drops seeds into open rows below.

For some men the pride of ownership lay in fences

stretched taut from post to post, cutting their kingdoms

to fiefdoms—fields for grain, hay, or cattle.  In Kentucky, I recall

the rhythm of white wooden fences following the slow motion

of slopes through the bluegrass country, stud farms

turning out thoroughbreds grazing pasture land,

time determined by landscapes laid to order.

We tell ourselves order is everything we crave

laid out in fences, hedgerows, windbreaks, outbuildings,

barns, the homestead house passed down among sons’ generations.

Yet driving down random country roads, we race past motion

in rapid retrograde, vaguely aware the fences rushing behind

us in peripheral vision we, like planets standing still, see

in the face of time, men grasping comets’ blurs.

January 29, 2012