I brought him home from his pole
in the field
unhooked him
A few bits of straw fell
out of his pants
When I carried him across the threshold as one carries
a bride
I swear he smiled, but beneath the brim
of his straw hat, who could really tell
He doesn’t scare crows anymore
Crows crowd the field and gorge on
his absence
They round his abandoned spine
in delight, a maypole of abundance
I forgot to pull it up
his backbone
He lies in bed mostly these days
a few mice in his pants
tickling him
The farmer never replaced him
In his way, he is
irreplaceable
Inside his gloves, the dust of years
pooling to his fingertips
He has no hands, so what is
this music I hear
All the ways he touches me
holds me, the fresh smell of hay
how it enters me, lives in me
how I too, made of the stuff
often seek the old field
to watch the crows gobble
what is left of the grain
Now that he is gone
is it only right
how I go there
to hang myself on the pole
to feel in the hoisting up
the weight of something
I can never understand
music plucked to the strings of
baling twine
From the margins of the field they eye me
the crows in their brilliantine
I tell them to come and they do
gobbling my doubt and
disappointment, feasting on
all the tiny things that give
The wind takes my hat
Then my gloves let loose
their dust
From my legs sheared of shoes
pours out my scratchy heart
The mice are here, filling cheeks
preparing to make beds of me
To know that I’ll no more go to waste
than him makes me smile
with the face I no longer have