ON THE EVE OF A NEW MILLENNIUM                 listen

Drunk off his can and pissed at the ruse of another day,

back-ache a bum rap and woodpile shrunk to kindling,

the old man stood at the kitchen sink and stared out

at his neighbor’s cow.  What a filthy beast, he thought.

What a stinking, cud-chewing, gas-spewing waste of a field.

And then, because what else should happen on a day as dull

as this one, what better way to stun the silence out of all

it cannot say, he stumbled through the ashen rooms to find

his gun.  The front room table spilled its stack of magazines

and pens.  He was not a man who cared one whit for what

you might have thought of him.  He spat cruel words and mocked

your God and cheered the buzzards dropped to feed on roadkill.

What was all this talk about a new millennium to him?

Weren’t the evening and sun the same as always, and nowhere?

Even drunk, he didn’t miss, and the cow tumbled down

dead-weight and draining blood, and the good earth shook

on its foundation, knocked off its axis for a visible second,

the good earth clutched at the blood, drug it down, down,

and the neighbor boys hid in the back of their closets.

Here was a stretch of road a man like him could tuck himself

back down and not have to answer to a soul, least of all

some dimwit codger whose cow would stare him straight in the eye.

And then what happened, you’d like to know, as if stories

have endings that conclude or explain, as if stories heal loss,

stop time, weep light, speak truth, change lives, dream souls.

He tumbled himself into his truck, took off toward town

slinging gravel and missing the ditch, his arm out the window

conducting last light on the maples and shagbark hickories,

damning them all to hell, even the burnt stalks of corn

and the useless rail fence and the pigs caked with mud

lost somewhere he was tired of looking, and those bible verses

learned fifty years ago of the good soil and the bad soil,

and it took just a mile before he saw a car coming, and aimed. 

                    appeared in Ploughshares Volume 32, Number 4, Winter 2006-07