I guess it’s too late to live on the farmI guess it’s too late to move to a farmI guess it’s too late to start farmingI guess it’s too late to begin farmingI guess we’ll never have a farmI guess we’re too old to do farmingI guess we couldn’t afford to buy a farm anywayI guess we’re not suited to being farmersI guess we’ll never have a farm nowI guess farming is not in the cards nowI guess Lewis wouldn’t make a good farmerI guess I can’t expect we’ll ever have a farm nowI guess I have to give up all my dreams of being a farmerI guess I’ll never be a farmer nowWe couldn’t get a farm anyway though Allen Ginsberg got one late in lifeMaybe someday I’ll have a big gardenI guess farming is really outFeeding the pigs and the chickens, walking between miles of rows of cropsI guess farming is just too difficultWe’ll never have a farmToo much work and still to be poetsWho are the farmer poetsWas there ever a poet who had a self-sufficient farmFlannery O’Connor raised peacocksAnd Wendell Berry has a farmFaulkner may have farmed a littleAnd Robert Frost had farmlandAnd someone told me Samuel Beckett farmedVery few poets are real farmersIf William Carlos Williams could be a doctor and Charlie Vermont too,Why not a poet who was also a farmerOf course there was Brook FarmAnd Virgil raised beesPerhaps some poets of the past were overseers of farmersI guess poets tend to live more momentarilyThan life on a farm would allowYou could never leave the farm to give a readingOr go to a lecture by Emerson in ConcordI don’t want to be a farmer but my mother was rightI should never have tried to rise out of the proletariatUnless I can convince myself as Satan argues with EveThat we are among a proletariat of poets of all the classesEach ill-paid and surviving on nothingOr on as little as one needs to surviveSteadfast as any farmer and fixed as the starsTenants of a vision we rent out endlessly