You know you can hear when you hear
tractor through the trees.
The voice of the tractor is the voice of pain
it takes to live in this world.
You know you can see when you see
a dozen versions of the same field,
same stone, same wheel.
You know you can love when you love
to hop onto a tractor, sit there.
You know you can taste when grass tastes
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of tomorrow’s rain.
You know you can smell when lilacs
remind you of tractors.
Tractors are
attractions this way.
Tractors are vehicles for Gerry Hill, but not in the usual way.
Instead of implements, his tractors pull stories.
Hill, who teaches English and creative writing at the University of Regina’s Luther College, recently published his fifth book of poetry.
14 Tractors was inspired by a trip to St. Peter’s Abbey at Muenster, Sask., for a writing workshop, where brother Bernard Lange, the farm manager, showed him around.
Hill suggested there might be five or six tractors.
“He said, with just a hint of monkish pride, ‘we’ve got 14,’ ” the poet told the crowd attending his April 3 book launch.
On a hot, stifling summer day, brother Bernard started each of the tractors. Hill was not a tractor aficionado, but he found each could start a conversation as well.
The first part of his book features verse about the tractors, including photographs taken by Shelley Sopher and drawings and instructions from old tractor manuals.
The second focuses on what people told Hill when he asked if they had tractor stories.
The third part deals with brother Bernard’s death in 2004 and the shed fire three days later that destroyed two tractors and other equipment.
“Once you get going on tractors, there’s so much that’s true that you can get to,” Hill said. “True in a practical way. For a poet like me, they’re vehicles to the landscape, the culture.”
He said people sometimes think their knowledge of things like tractors is not valuable, that local knowledge is not worth sharing.
However, he said in this case people used tractors to express what it’s like to be alive. Their experiences with and views about tractors contributed to what they became.
Through the seven-year process of the book, Hill sat in many tractors, but the man who was born in Herbert, Sask., has never driven one.
He considered arriving at the book launch in a tractor but eventually decided that he had made it so far without the experience and there was no reason to change.
“I am fond of tractors, I must say.”
Hill said he is happy to hear more stories and is willing to read from his book. He will spend part of May as a writer-in-residence at the Wallace Stegner House in Eastend, Sask.
He can be contacted through www.geraldhill.ca.
What You Think About on the Tractor
In the field when you start, when you’ve been off
a self-propelled implement for a while
You think about what you’re doing. Otherwise
doze along, try not to fall asleep.
Everything from A to Z because what else is there.
Round and round in ever-decreasing circles
5 miles an hour if you’re seeding
or swathing, maybe 11/2 to 5
on the combine, depending on the crop (better the crop, slower you go),
up at six, out in the field by eight, go till ten o’clock.
Third of a million for a new John Deere, that’s what you think about.
Turn the radio on, listen to the news.
Turn it off after a while.
Maybe you’re one of those types who says
when assignments pile up at university
“It will be nice to get back on the tractor
with my mind just ticking over.”
You think about politics, what’s for supper,
what’s on for Saturday night. Or, Man,
I need a new combine.
One year we combined flax in December, got our
picture in the Western Producer, you think about that.
Or this: If I won the lottery
I wouldn’t be sitting on this stinking tractor.
And when you come in at night you want
complete silence.
