Dan’s Story

Winter should bleach this land,

be white as a funeral shroud.

This year, no snow, and ground

the color of freezer-burnt beef

lies exposed.  I have left my wife

at the house to make my visit.

In the field behind me, I found a rabbit,

half-eaten, curled up and spattered

with old blood.  Now I’ve reached the border

of Ken Gordon’s land.  I’m wishing

for my younger self to reappear.

An old man’s heart will fail.

Ken’s has held out too long already,

but I have come to retrieve a moment

I put here twenty years ago.

I’m thinking about the way important words

to a loved one still fail

as I make my way across Ken’s fence

and through the border growth

where dry brown grasses tuft out

the spokes of an ancient wheel.

Even with my stocking cap on

both of my ears sting

as I climb toward the idle buildings.

Someone else takes care of the place

in Ken’s absence, but I’m the only one

who knows about the sled

hidden in the rafters of his barn.

Ken’s lost now, fading out among doctors

and the dead green glow

of the hospital heart monitor.  I know

he will never need the sled again.

No sound but the stark, cold lash

of bent branches too quickly let go

against my denim coat,

and the crack of black twigs underfoot.

All over, in the yard’s gaunt thickets,

sparrows huddle against the wind.  If birds

had metaphors, they’d think of my thick blue coat

as a sky less cruel than the one

that flags their feathers.  My cap

keeps threatening to snag on a brittle branch,

but I reach the barn unscathed

and shove against its door.

Rusted wheels strain against the track,

but they move, and I am glad

for a solid wall to the north

though the lull in here is cold too,

and the wind picks up termite-dust

and rust from old cream cans,

scattering it back to piles.

I haven’t hidden here for twenty years.

Then from my parents.  Now only my wife

and I live in that house.

Here there’s been no change

except the gray, tilted walls

more pitched by east Montana wind,

and the worn plywood table, old then,

now warped and sagging in on itself

like caved-in ground.

I have never known how Ken missed

all the tracks in his yard when I was young,

footprints and sled tracks all around

and down the hill from his barn.

He never mentioned it.  In the bleak twilight

of my childhood, that sled’s runners

were red like spring birds, and smooth.

When I find the sled now, they too

have gone old, worn to the metal

and left to rust.  Even the board

seems small and faded, and out of nowhere

I’m struck with the thought

that I can never know how a woman feels

when she has lost a child.

I won’t go to visit Ken.  I prefer

the slow burn of this memory—that he was

a half-glimpsed neighbor

with an empty barn, in the place where I grew up.

Winter should be white as marble,

but the white winters are gone.

In the stale, cold air, I watch the mist

of my words descend as I tell myself:

            you will forget everything

            you might have loved.

--Herring405

*originally appeared in Oxford Magazine, vol. xii, Spring/Summer 1998