So Many of Us

So Many of Us

The same wildcats have been assembled outside the farmhouse
for 52 years. The old man sits inside, slatted chair pressed
against a broad uncovered table with a pen in his one hand

and what he imagines to be a sword in the other but I
watching from across the room when I should be in bed
beneath the mildewed sheets know the sword doesn't exist.

The wildcats scream and while he writes I think
of the dead fox we found that morning and how he
unsteady on his feet had studied it too long and I said

"It's a fox" and he held up his writing hand and I fell quiet
as he nudged the mangled head with his booted toe
until we dragged the carcass into the empty chicken coop.

The wildcats' hunger consumed my day and filled my night.
Their screams I thought were the screams of he and I
driven crazy by the permanence they suffered

in the notebooks of a crazed old man who was soon dead.
I did not know he would continue to this day a half-century later
to sit beneath the swinging bulb writing

and that I would write myself here beneath
my own light of the old man who loved
nothing more than the passing of time.