Another Farm Poem

Anyone who has ever visited my parents' farm has seen the gray buildings sitting beyond the small orchard. They were originally bunkhouses and could be put on the railroad tracks and moved from one logging camp to another. My grandfather bought them and moved them onto the farm, probably during the Great Depression, as I've been told he borrowed $600 at that time and set up a chickenhouse. When I was little, the buildings stood in a long row with a raised porch between them; the closest one to the house was a shop; the other was the chickenhouse. Years ago Dad pushed the chickenhouse sideways and turned it into an open shed. This picture is of the backside. Anyway, I mention these outbuildings in the following poem and can't imagine that anyone would understand their significance to me without some explanation.

WHAT THE HEART HOLDS

I've written too many poems
that begin with pouring a cup of coffee.
But I pour a cup anyway
and carry it outside. I sit on the back deck
under my mother's kitchen window
contemplating the pear tree, the clothesline,
the fish pond. I sit staring at the gate
that opens to fields I know by heart.
I grew up here, and if a poet
can be a citizen of any country --
this is mine. I've read somewhere
that when you lose anything your heart
has to make room for it.
Emily Dickinson said this, too,
more or less: "The brain is wider
than the sky / for the brain the sky contains."
I think she meant "the mind" or maybe "the soul."
Maybe she meant "the heart." It seems
in any case that my father
has now moved into my heart
and while I sit here, drinking my coffee
and watching a breeze play in the orchard trees,
I imagine him setting up house there,
like Whosoever Will in the old Sunday School lesson.
Next to go will be this farm with its plum
and pear and apple trees, the unweeded flowerbeds,
the ancient boxcars -- once bunkhouses,
then shop and chickenhouse --
resting atilt on their foundations, abandoned.
My heart unfolds like the American flag
at Dad's graveside service. It shakes out
and folds in again, stars and stripes, night sky
and fog, all the trees of my childhood --
vine maple, cedar, holly, douglas fir.
I take it all in. I drain the last of my coffee
and sit holding the empty cup, holding
this empty feeling that must be vastness,
this sense of how big my heart will have to be.