I can see the boy: a reading of Uncle With Landscape

by Roger Anderson
Poem: Uncle with Landscape — Kansas, 1954
Poet: Benjamin Vogt
Published in: Valparaiso Poetry Review (Fall/Winter 2003-04)

When I ran across this poem on the Valparaiso Poetry Review website, I was instantly taken back to my childhood. I could smell, taste, touch, even remember events I had forgotten when growing up as a boy on my family's farm in southern Iowa. I believe that certain lines, that maybe don't specifically describe scent or touch, can impart these sensations through the sounds of each line. I strongly suggest you read this poem out loud to hear them.

For example, in the opening two lines -- The corner of the farmhouse, worn by wind / that has warmed fields for centuries, is bent -- I can hear the tired, aged, yet purposeful strength in the repetitive sounds of “corner” and “worn,” and the “w” sound in the three words in the first line feel wobbly, wintered, weary, and waving. Maybe it's just a sound that makes me think of other words with other meanings that might relate, but it works, and I'm there in my childhood again helping milk the cows, moving hay bales to the loft in the barn, or soaking up the sun while ignoring chores just like the tired objects in this photograph. There are the spades and rusted buckets and a toppled silo . Even the boy, posing for a brief moment and a bit unsure of why (maybe shy, maybe in trouble, maybe on the way to church) he has his hands / in overalls and hair shaved army thin” and “clean arms not yet tanned by earth or grease.

I can see the boy, I can see my friends, I can see my own children, and I can see myself.

Toward the end the boy turns down, away from the camera. This is why I think he's shy. What boy isn't in front of the camera when he's spit shined? Maybe he's dressed clean to go to a Sunday picnic on a neighbor's farm, maybe some cousins are coming in from another town. Family is very important, especially in rural communities where we depend on one another and check on one another in hard times. The fact that we work so hard on the land, and sometimes get so little and yet so much from it, really makes me understand the last two lines which feel peaceful and even rejoicef ul in the face of lost memories: he's become / the lines of fields, the sway of thinning wheat, / the passing shadow, brief and cloudless night . That rhythm feels like the wind in the fields.

I can hear the wind surfing through the hundreds of acres of corn I grew up in, just as it sounds in my ear or against the house at night when a storm is coming. Looking back, these memories were brief, too brief, but this poem helped me see them again and appreciate where I am, the value in the people and places that makes the heart of America so unique and worth preserving, just like Mr. Vogt's old photograph and this wonderful poem.

Roger Anderson is a retired corn and soybean farmer from
southern Iowa. He is now a part-time custodian at an elementary
school near Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he and his wife
of thirty years are active in their children's and granchildren's lives.
He has published poems in Artword Quarterly, Evansville Review ,
Gumball Poetry, The Lutheran Journal and Poetry Motel.