Finding Myself Just Short of Fifty

                   
                   
He'll be sitting                    
my stepfather, at the table                    
cold, even with two coats on.                    
They say,                  
the old men who remember                    
by Jesus, he was a wild one.                    
He'd have to live three lives                    
just to pay back all of the shit                    
he put his first wife through before she'd had enough                    
of this world.                    
Now he spends the down-time between sleep                    
in this room, waiting for something                    
neither he nor any other of us knows,                    
erasing each day in the kitchen                    
working at crossword puzzles until after dark.                    
The doctors cut out his meats              
salts and cheeses, left him only cake,                    
pills and cake                    
twice a day something pure                    
like it always was.                    
                   
As for my birth father,                  
he was a fierce one too,          
tracked well killed well                    
and always saw the need for blood                    
felt the gut-level rightness that keeps a man                    
true in his own path                    
clean of regret,        
yet for years now he's had no need                    
to do his own killing...                
a few chickens.                    
The store does the rest.                    
"I still like to run the bear                    
but once the dogs get him treed                    
there's no thrill in it.                    
Don't shoot them anymore.                    
Hunched up in the high tangle of limbs                    
it's like another man looking back          
scared, letting you know he's beaten.                    
Can't look him in the eye,          
still half awake and run-up out of his element                    
asking nothing but to be left alone                    
just to tear that face open with a slug                    
and call it sport.                    
Maybe I've softened."                    
                   
It's for the best that men might come to change                    
that we may learn something after all.                    
Finding myself just short of fifty                  
that hoary giant of decadence I once was                  
is still of little consolation                    
to my pride        
the one who managed to wrap his luck                  
around the paths of a few bullets,                  
to fold his mind into quantum contortions,                
to walk away from more than one binge                    
where a friend who matched it died trying.          
Those details are for another story,                 
but by the sum total of small concessions              
I have eased-off the throttle                
and ride out the momentum of a distant rage                    
drifting on into a bad decade.                                
                   
There is, so I hear  
much to be said for sobriety  
for growing out of grandiose naïveté            
but can only conclude                  
I'm the wrong one to say it.                          
The bear is on his last run, treed                  
staring back at the man who was me                    
pushed up into the corner of the northland.                  
I'm not the bold and better man                
who lived inside this skin.                  
There's an ending to face                  
just not tonight.                  
                   
Tonight I'm in my father's house.                    
We will need to leave by dawn for the mountain.                    
He sleeps.                    
The rest of the town sleeps.                    
The day's done well with the warmth                    
despite being on the wrong end of summer.                    
In the dark corner of the screened porch I keep vigil                    
intent upon the breathing of the night                    
the breathing of the leaves                    
my father breathing                    
the rhythm of the colorless grass                    
changing up stagnation for faint soiled drafts                    
slowly in, slowly                    
out                    
but always a little more                    
on the out                    
losing ground.                    
The fury and care wound into our well-bound day                    
is leaking, lost                    
and sleep                    
not death, but boring                    
old-fashioned sleep                    
that living surrender                    
comes on hard                    
and overtakes me.