The modern farmer

Oh father how you crowd so close
in this cold barn. How you sweat at fences
and your breaking ice for horses.

If there must be a birth, let it be vaporous.
Let these cleanroom walls witness a fog
like that of liquid nitrogen subliming into air.
Let the paintings all be Turners, and the silos
that once rose like Serra slabs in steel, oxidize
into something new but lesser. Let the smoke
lie low. Oh father how you crowd so close
in this cold barn. How you sweat at fences
and your breaking ice for horses. Sit further
off still. Let us spit apart like ions,
like a mixed solution that stews and seethes,
and in the end, settles for nothing.