DRY CRIK Journal

                        My horse is not sure he can make it
                        to the next star. You are free.
                                    - Richard Hugo (“To Women”)

The burden the stork brought, you start it all –
a child then filled with dreams, you bore
your fears and learned with me. Black soot,

roadways inflamed with smudge pot sentries,
red helmets straight for miles into the night,
always crystalline, dark rafts above by day,

for weeks. Checking temperatures,
starting wind machines, climbing towers
towards the props on flat-head Ford V8s

roaring in his ears, he was a bear asleep
before the fire, diesel sweater, when we
awoke into the smells of his dark nights.

Dialysis, thoracentesis you refuse and send
them packing, only to ask next morning
if you heard the Doctor right, ‘another day?’

‘Day by day,’ I think he said –
all of us learning together once more
how to die, how to live each breath, at last.