Poem

Coming Night

It darkens, brother,
and your crutch-tip grinds
the gravel the deer stepped delicately along
one breakfast, you were a kid.
Mother says after thirty,
decades clip by
‘and then you have the sum’
or spent it.
What was it like when the car
swerved on the ice,
what did you think of,
how long did you wait
in the wreck with the pain?
I see the sumacs by the turning space
turn their lank leaves,
the railway move to us
and the willows below us
and think of you turning nineteen,
of the deer, the sumac, trains, a wreck.

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