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What You Do after Someone Dies
You go where they did.
Say it is a barn.
Boots will still be there,
Pairs and pairs, unbuckled.
Straw on the cement floor
Won't have been swept,
No-one to hold the broom handle.
This becomes your job. So does feeding.
Inside, dust folds itself around you
Like a web, but watch:
When you carry a dusty pail of grain
Out to the bewildered cows
Life will swell, inevitable, unfair.
Their noses will be wet, their breath hot,
Though the arm in the sweatshirt they nuzzle,
Sleeves eaten away, isn't his.
This is something you can't tell them.
They know. Go back inside, pail empty.
Stack it with the others.
Line the boots along the wall, toes turned in.
If the radio is on and the clock right,
It will break your heart.
Farm, Summer
We'd be out in the barn
scooping grain into silver buckets
you feeling your age
though I couldn't guess it
seemed so permanent,
the barn, your breath, our brimming
buckets promising never
to leave. Later I
moved away to stranger fields, and
when your breath stopped that summer spun,
remembering:
I promised to stay,
bucket in hand under the
aching beams, you.
Surrender
I miss the smell of apples
in Michigan, our backyard
and that tree we used to have,
the fruit always too small--
always some mysterious hole
wormed under the skin.
I miss knowing the tree would be outside
thick air bursting into the tart
shape it gave my childhood,
struggling pale into fall:
surrender-full.
I don't feel that shape anymore.
When the tree gave up, we
cut it down.
Everything shifted, and
somehow when I imagine fall at home
my mind stretches back further
than it should
paints the tree alive
me young.
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December 2000
vol. 55 no. 4
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