At Least It’s Far from My Heart

Jessica Poli

is what the farmer said 
about the leg that was giving him trouble—
arthritis, maybe, or an old injury 
from God knows what, a horse’s kick,
a run-in with a trailer hitch, a gate closed 
too quick; there are so many ways 
to get hurt in this work, is what I’m saying;
for example, the neighbor who lost his finger
to a wood splitter, or the one whose sleeve 
got stuck in an auger while digging a hole. 
And then there are all the bent-kneed 
middle-aged men climbing carefully down 
from tractor cabs, walking to their houses for dinner, 
hunched over, their limbs growing stiffer each day.
But the heart is the thing that matters most—
and was it this farmer’s father or another’s 
who was found in a silo he’d been cleaning 
after his had suddenly given up? 
Whoever he was, he’d been young—
no more than 60, although likely he looked older
from all the hot months spent haying fields 
and moving cattle, sun-exhausted and sore.
And now I think about these men 
mapping out their injuries, counting the inches
between the wound and the muscle pumping
at their core, that great provider. 
How they might place a callused hand
over their chest at the end of a long day,
just hoping for more.

Jessica Poli is the author of four chapbooks and co-editor of the collection More in Time: A Tribute to Ted Kooser (University of Nebraska Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Southern Indiana Review, The Adroit Journal, and Redivider, among other places. She is a PhD student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, founder and editor of Birdfeast, and Assistant Poetry Editor of Prairie Schooner.