Out to Pasture

HOMESTEADER

The ’37 Chevy pickup, retired to a rest

of rust and thistles, sloughed off its front

wheels—the better to munch the sod and

ruminate on great loads hauled: lumber,

a keg of nails, the tools and paint

for their first frame farmhouse, then

the bed, a castiron cookstove with its

clatter of pans, plus the barbwire and

feedbags, a pump…later, kids

and hogs and heifers to the county fair.

Lasting out the War to End All Wars, and

then Korea, she earned her ease, turned

out to pasture by the old woodlot, where

time and the weather wrought a work of art,

making her a monument to herself.

Born in Idaho in1926, John Haag was a member of the Merchant Marine during World War II and a naval veteran of the Korean conflict. He studied at the University of Washington and later as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Reading in Britain. After his study there he became a professor of English at Penn State University, where he taught for over thirty years. During that time he published three books of poetry: The Mirrored Man (1961), The Brine Breather (1971), and Stones Don’t Float: Poems Selected and New (1996). He died in Pennsylvania in 2008.

Wonderful the way Haag has brought the old truck to life through the lives and chores of a family over the years.