I think it’s four in the morning there
and he’s had a beer or ten,
his voice loaded with the loneliness
of evenings together as father and son
we lost to the war
I sense he senses I’m finally getting old
The diminutive bull he once feared
hobbles through native grasses,
sits transfixed for hours watching
eagles circle canyons and mesas,
kneels crookedly in meadows
scouting for signs of elk, deer and fox,
and can say with certainty at night,
“that was cougar, that was owl”
When the boy I’ve lost in the confusion of living
talks politics, music and women,
I wonder what he’ll think when I confess
I want my corpse burned rather than
wait two hundred years for it to rot
This, I always decide, must also wait
until I can assure him with a casual voice
I’m calm with my karma
Until I can be so brave I repeat
tales of how I came before him,
of how I still want to roam in the wind
with the spirits of coyotes, and then
we hang up thousands of miles apart
with everything we intended to say
unsaid, promising to ourselves we’ll get
to it another time when it feels right