Sean Sexton is still working the cattle ranch in Vero Beach that his ancestors settled more than a hundred years ago. WGCU's Cary Barbor talked with him at the Miami Book Fair in November about his new collection of poetry, May Darkness Restore.
“My grandfather came to Florida in 1912,” says Sexton. “He decided to see the world, so he came to Florida. The first name for Vero Beach was cross-tie pile number 121 on the Florida East Coast Railroad. That was in 1898.”
These days, that scrap of land is a fully functioning, 600-acre ranch that keeps Sexton busy with seemingly endless farming tasks. So how does he manage to write too? He grabs any time he can. And he takes advantage of old and new technology.
“I keep a notebook with me always,” he says. “And as I’m driving, the stuff is just coming to me. If I stopped, it would stop coming to me. So I took my phone and hit the little microphone and drafted a poem.”
Still, the demands of a working ranch will not wait. Sexton missed the opening party of the Miami Book Fair for more urgent matters.
“My last chore was to check the heifers. We had a heifer with a prolapsed uterus. We had a bull with a broken back the day before that we had to call the abbatoir and harvest. You know, there’s heartache,” he says.
But no matter how bracing, Sexton finds inspiration in the daily work of the ranch.
“That stuff, it makes me write,” he says.
Here, a poem inspired by that work. It’s called Semen Testing the Herd Bulls.
We get an early start.
Each, driven from seclusion,
congenial as flood-staged rivers
they set in motion on lumbering trajectories
to the gate. We push them in trios and quartets—
bellowing down the lane, a rider betwixt
to stage them strategically in the pens. Once
arrived, the usual upstart gets thrown though a fence.
And they fill the hopper one by one, brought up
the runway, a bull at a time for the test, as others
wait like the elderly on their scripts at the chemist.
Some barely fit the squeeze, poled behind, palpated
before insertion of the probe, then three moments,
three rocking pulses, a crystalline slide of half-lives
in the lens— I see a whole semi-load of calves!
is the shout. Boss says, Worm him and turn him out.
More poems from Sexton's new collection, May Darkness Restore:
Black on Black, White on White
They emerge from the womb's prism
into shining light—
yea black by black,
red of red, white from white,
and strike the ground like lightning,
in dazzling color: cream spilt in the grass
beige, terra cotta, coffee and coal. Heaven's
fawning kiss, deepest, darkest twilit pelts,
strewn with stars, phases of the moon, setting
foreheads, sorrel horizons, brockle-faced,
pieded and bald, two-toned, watermarked,
whole legs of alabaster, pizzles dipped in ivory,
deckle-edges, roan underlines, lace and finery,
The old cow conventions in every hue, done
in mauve, pink, saffron, and circles round the sun.
Have you never seen a purple cow?
All the while as
we put black with black,
white on white, red to red
thinking to have our way
in this world—
we were breeding rainbows.
Pine Heart
Thank God for pine knots!
Mary Chestnut, from A Diary from Dixie, during the siege of Richmond
Those hard amalgamations
from a former state of the world—
the years concentrate like love, scattered
over whole tracts, remains
of when, they say, a squirrel could run
through stands of ancient pine
branch to branch gulf to ocean.
Relics the cold brings to mind,
unearthed, or gathered like eggs,
when chill breaks upon the days
and with the light, rises
recalling the true universe:
all warmth fugitive, fleeting.
Yet that sweetened air
returns to neighborhood evenings
in smoky malinger.
The fallen tree, driven around
two summers since the wind,
cut and stacked with rotted-
off posts, the pile revisited.
Quickly a wood-yard, made in a clearing,
and confection again,
opening from split chunks of pine
flayed and strewn like something slain.
With sharpened steel, angle, and swing
that searches the grain, all our wanting
illusory. We only need find that door
between each knot, great things in store.
