Postcard from Home
In sepia a tractor
resting in sagebrush and snow,
rusting, resigned to wind.
A foreshortened farmhouse,
windows bereft of glass.
Last, a mountain range.
Among a hundred others
in a Billings second-hand store
a day before my flight.
A place, passing, someone paused
to take a photograph
of what remained of someone else.
Those exquisite peaks, horizons
never reached, abandoned without apology.
All the ways the West has
of giving up, of getting on.
As if a tourist, I pictured myself
working some other field,
seasons going somewhere else.
I took it with me when I left.
by Mike Barrett
from Post Road Magazine