Cate Farm, Dresden Mills, Maine, July 31, 2014
The photo above is of the Cate Farm in Dresden Mills, Maine, where our family spent summers and sabbatical leaves from 1956-1995, and where my wife Jean and I have been retired since 1996. It is the location for the poems to be found in the free, downloadable on-line chapbook titled: Attic, Shed, and Barn by Lewis Turco, Tokyo: Ahadada Books, 2009, 28 pp.
ATTIC, SHED AND BARN
There are always the attic, the shed
and the barn when you’ve nothing else to do
except gaze out the glass door at the turkeys
feeding in the snow. You’ve given them cracked corn,
and you’ve fed the bluejays their peanuts
in the box hanging from the underside
of the deck. So it’s down to the barn where
the seasons lie ruminating among boards
and boxes, and up the shallow steps
made to be used by the dying grandma
who left before she could use them. Now you’re
nearly old enough to appreciate them
yourself. Upstairs, over your bookshop,
the new part of the building, you begin
to see more recent yesterdays gathering:
the overflow of books, posters still scrolling
among themselves on the floor, and this:
your first computer! An Osborne One left
over from 1982, looking like
a sewing machine in its carrying case.
You know today your watch has more K
than that Osborne had. They called it the first
portable computer — its six-inch monitor,
built in, could show only a quarter-page at
a time. People got dizzy if they
watched as you worked, scrolling back and forth, up
and down, whipping out the words faster than you
used to be able to type, and that was fast.
As far as you know, the machine still
works…and there’s the file of floppies! All that
deathless verse you had to retype on later
hard drives. You wonder how long it will lie there
snoring against the timbers of the barn.
