Classic Poem

A academic poetician friend
while discussing my
rural adventures
tells me that he hopes I won’t fall victim
to the endemic poematosis of the region, by which, as he explains,
he means the writing
of ‘barnyard revelation poems’.
I haven’t laughed so much in years.
I suppose, instead, I should be producing
postmodern supermaket odes, or linguo-spatiological
poematographs of the
secret life of words—the kinds of things
a close analysis of ‘intimate’ might intimate, or the way
‘impact’ can become ‘impacted’—as if
the post-modern supermarket were anything much other than
sawn-up, mashed, sliced, bottled or deep-
frozen barnyard
or the forms and paraforms, the traces and
fathomless abysses of words were any more
than the cum- and pain- and joy-cries
of farmers and their
wives and children, buried under
layer upon layer of the tangled Western Mind.