The Sunday Poem: Housebuilding Near Montague Farm

When I was a kid, after my parents divorced, my dad worked on a commune in Massachusetts called Montague Farm. This was the real deal: a working farm where I first saw chickens get their heads chopped off, where I first (and last) picked spinach in the sun, and also where there were blond girls named Sequoia running around and piles of anti-nuke comic books sitting on the end tables. My favorite featured a three-legged frog. If anyone has a copy, let me know.

It looks like the torch has been passed and now a Zen meditation and peace center owns the farm. I would have liked to go back and visit (I went back, once, at a reunion event in the early 90s or late 80s), but it won’t be the same — the farm I remember did not have terraced lawns and rainbow colored walls. It had a cast-iron stove that would melt sneakers if you put them on it, and there was a somewhat mean bull in the pasture closest to the house. The lawns were rocky, and I recall someone getting hurt pretty bad one winter when they sledded down one of them and hit something.

Behind the farm were woods: to an 8 year old, endless woods. Houses were tucked out there, amidst the trees, and sometimes, a new one would go up, out there beyond the pasture, past where the beehives were kept.

Housebuilding Near Montague Farm

It loomed like a skeleton taking shape.
Bright clothes clambered over angles of fresh cedar,
Called out like sandpaper, and pulled
Splinters from their toes while sitting on stumps,
Axes leaning against their sides.
I could see the holes the windows already were,
Could almost picture a bed hanging
In the empty air, woolly coverlet flapping in breeze.

Leaves rustled. They passed a joint, tossed
Their long hair, batted at each other with sweaty caps.
One was tossed a beer from the ground,
And it twirled in the air like a comet,
Floating up like God forgot gravity, up twenty feet.

Sweat and Donna Summer on the radio,
The breeze just starting, and it was all,
All I could do not to spin around
And scatter the nails I had been entrusted,
Spin and whirl the leaves around me
To blow through the frame and weave
The sky I saw into a blanket of summer,
To watch things build themselves
And know nothing of coming apart.