Death of a Farmer

“What a place to die!”

My father’s form, bib-overalled, lay prone

In horse-tromped hay and weedy loam, his head

Lap-held by his child son now suddenly

Grown man. “I closed his eyes,” he said,

“And held his jaw.”

My mother’s cry

Was anguish—yet what fitter place for him,

On land he tilled for these last thirty years?

The stable where he housed his first young flock

Already ghosted by the move to town,

Rain-leached, wind-dried, his only meager shade

The nests of sparrows in the willowed shed.

The cabin where he brought her as a bride

Is gone, the chicken coop, the river gate.

The well was here, the granary stood there,

The woodpile and the ax—I see them now

Between the banks of orchard, ringed by fence

And poplar trees, since yielded to his plow.

His small-boned feet are shrunken in his shoes,

His work-scarred hands relaxed, soil-grimed,

Still shovel-handle curved; his hat aside,

The tall form spare, his chiseled nostrils still—

Breathed in, breathed out, and not breathed in again,

Between the water-turn and shocking wheat,

In one convulsive, crucifying pain.

Death waives decorum, neither waits the bath

On Saturday, the Sunday shave, the tie,

But took him as he was. And so do I.