A song that announces its subject and then defines it by what is missing is already doing something odd. "I sing about places where / it is impossible to find a cow." The speaker takes up the grand posture of the bard, the "I sing" of old epic openings, but the places he celebrates are known only by absence. The title, "Back of beyond," is an everyday idiom for somewhere remote, so the poem sets out to give voice to the unvoiced edges of the map.
The cow is an inspired choice. It is the most ordinary farmyard animal, a sign of pasture, milk and human settlement. Saying that you cannot find one tells you at once that you are beyond the reach of ordinary life. There is also a dry joke in it. Who goes looking for a cow in the middle of nowhere? The line has the deadpan tone of someone giving directions to a place nobody would visit, and that tone runs through the whole poem. Notice too how the one long word, "impossible," stands out among plain, short ones like "cow," "flag," "wind" and "ants." Even the impossible gets said in everyday speech.
The second stanza is trickier. There is no punctuation, so "where in the desert / will a flag need the wind" can be read two ways. It might continue the first sentence, as another description of these remote places. Or it might be a question, with the stanza's first "where" meaning "in what part of the desert?" I think the poem wants both readings. Either way, the image is odd and memorable. A flag is a symbol of claiming and belonging, and it needs wind to look like anything more than a rag. In a desert, judging by the image, there may be nobody to claim anything for, and nobody to watch the flag fly. Human emblems of ownership and pride seem to lose their purpose out there. The repeated "where" at the start of the stanza gives a slight chant-like pull, as if the speaker's song keeps circling back to the same question.
Then comes the poem's best turn: "or a miracle do as much / as one hundred ants / for the night life." Here the poem moves from the political (the flag) to the spiritual (the miracle), and brings both down to the scale of insects. Splitting "night life" into two words matters here. The phrase normally suggests clubs, lights and crowds. In the desert it means what actually moves in the dark, and the poem's answer is a hundred ants. The number is small and precise, and a very modest crowd. The comparison is funny, but it also shifts values. A miracle, the biggest event imaginable, is said to do no more for the place than a few insects going about their business. The statement either deflates the miracle or lifts the ants, and I think it does both. The poem seems to prefer what is small, present and alive to what is grand and symbolic.
Structurally the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no capital letters beyond the pronoun "I." Its stanzas run two lines, two lines, then three. The lines also shrink: the first stanza stretches to a ten-syllable line, the second settles around five or six syllables, and the last tapers from seven to five to four, ending on the quiet "night life." The poem thins out as it moves into the emptiness it describes, and it ends on a note of smallness. The missing punctuation adds to this. Without full stops the sentences drift and merge, and the reader moves through the poem a bit like a traveller crossing open ground with no fences.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with so little. In about thirty words it takes a grand literary pose and gently undercuts it, and it turns a list of absences (no cow, no wind for the flag, no miracle worth the name) into an odd kind of praise. The remote place is not pitied, since the speaker sings about it. For a student reader, the lesson is that a poem can be witty and serious at once. A joke about cows and ants can also ask what really gives a place life, and the poem's answer seems to be that it is something humbler than a miracle.