Old Farmer
by Vievee Francis

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Texas Hill Country, 2003

You are in the open room, on the old couch,
and will not or cannot remember me. You smile
and joke with the stranger eating meat at your table.

Strangeness in a woman means she can’t be trusted,

so you keep your distance on the other side of the room.
Laughter is, in the end, Devil’s Medicine, but you can’t help it,
you laugh. Because my father is miles away I laugh too.

Once, I thought you and he were the same man.
You beat him into manhood. He beat me into the common
turns: fat aunt, mad martyr. Why make it pretty? I’m not.

I planned this visit to make peace with my place,
with my cotton-picker’s knuckles, my teeth
sharp as a coon’s up a tree.

Brutal Paw,
I have come to give you what for,
but you have grown short and hunched in my absence.

The plow that furrowed your brow will soon break your plot.
Though you have not forgotten how fit for sin all women are,
you grin, and I laugh at this trick of fate.

Grandma says, “He doesn’t know you anymore.”
And I must remember to tell your son, my father,
that he too may one day forget himself, and be forgiven.

"Old Farmer" by Vievee Francis from HORSE IN THE DARK by Vievee Francis, copyright © 2012 Northwestern University Press. Used by permission of Northwestern University Press.