The Old Oak, Last Light

Last light oak. A day swinging in the gathering wind

like some lonesome cowpoke strung up

for lack of anything else to do.

I sit on the shadowed porch, stiff backed

in the old man's lazy chair missing Jim Beam.

The year, a long slow drift, edges against me,

fills the borders of the empty ride down

through the unforgiving canyon he called home.

He was a cantankerous SOB, hard heart

you either loved or didn't--no terms ever

offered or given. I squared the circle

the summer we spent whoring over the black-top,

driving re-bar into the bedrock of a wild mountain.

Twenty-one years of swallowed grit between us,

he cackled, a joke to rub me raw of any notion

I was anything but a rube busting knuckles

for nothing. A pimply kid, soft hands in need of blisters.

My aunt, god love her, stood toe to toe with the devil, 

took his terms and added her own

conditions--boots off at the door, clean shirt

and manners at the table. I remember how

he never failed to say thank you before standing up

after dinner, making sure she knew

we were ever so grateful.

When September came, I packed up and cleared out

for a higher education. The morning I left

I found him by the back door, dragging

his cigarette, waiting. What's black, white and smells

like hell warmed over? A drunk punk, who's had

his head up Eliot's a*s all night! He laughed.

We laughed. Shook hands before he headed off

for another day of mountain steering.

Through the years I'd send him odd bits

of verse, whenever T.S. and I had had a few

too many. He'd write back, short and sober thanks,

his hard-handed calligraphy a mockery of my own

pretentious aspirations. Have another shot of Jim

boy, you might just yet, learn a little something

about yourself. I don't know that I ever did.

His last letter arrived a week after the lawyer's.

A chicken scrawl of restless thoughts--

Dear Son, I never had...--

the last laugh, still hard

and on his own terms, written I suspect

in the last light, the old oak in sight.

Ken e Bujold