"what is fleeting can't be
guarded:",,,

Nothing is ever as good, or as bad, as made-out to be, and does not even exist as a real proposition unless not to be is standing by, either within some needful, useful leverage, or an adaquate amount of Freudian-slight o'hand to effect a redemptive scratch of the head or ass. Think this poem makes this case in a worthy, treadwell fashion.

Among all the soil-stuffs offered in the poem roils all the human stuffs trying to fit its clay to the loams of actual out of which loams of the supra should rise-up to poultice the aching soul, validate what the skull holds to a degree of pretention that barely out-weighs the secondary roils that define the classic of belly's half-full/half-empty. The human wear and tear in being at one with the land hardly matches the Romantic or transcendental notions that have been attached to the relationship. When not soldiering, I have made by keep by physical labor: sweat makes for poor quality vales of mists, and is usually to distracted to notice whatever beetle-sized rainbows might fall from the brow or be thwarted entirely by rolling down the crack of one's ass. I have raised gardens, hogs, chickens, and raided like ant to aphid whatever was in season by way of nuts, berries, fruit, and select herbal things. While each of these things furnished it own sense of modulated joy and satisfaction, the real reward was in the conversations that gnatted the getting, the doing, the canning or salting, and most especially, the follow-on of good eating that went winter-long. Never felt like Thoreau, though. A state of mind that is not all that easy to attain when not dreamed-in from a the stories about and from a man's life.

Mr. Roderick's poem puts all the evidence between man and soil out there on a pair of scales that are sneeze-proof. I applaude his having done so. And I am glad that he was fair enough to not leave in the weeds some mention of the wren-words that Thoreau left for us. Poem expresses what is too often absent in this man-soil thing: an adult, realistic point of view.

Apologies to all that this post was less about this worthy poem than it deserves. Am sure that others will offer more toward that end.

Carpe Verve all.