We burned everything he kept. He’d forgotten most of it before, but now there is no hope he will remember anything. In the back room, everything, drawer by drawer, tipped into the fire. We keep the robe. Everyone wears it, alone. It stalks down to the lake, up for the fire, pauses, just a minute to dry, hangs.











Strophe

Paths Jerry made are the paths we still use. One through the flat land and birches dying. Some trees have always lain down across, split and waiting. Another takes you east, along the island’s limit—a peninsula—and descends under wetland. He placed stones down the face, leading to a shelf for bathing. Sumac overhangs; roots uplift steps. The cabin sits on cinder blocks, his name on a sign outside it. All over the rest of the island, ivy. Thorns, thickness.











Fence

It will never take night, a moon, or waking from sleep; I walk off our island, to Sarah’s, and into the silo to pray. Praying begins listening: to a century without fodder, to brick. Wind whistles, the low of your ear, the call from a loon—the only one in the lake. All these hollow bones. Where I cross, the horses have dipped halfway into the silo, trying to feed. The call of almost any animal with the right shaped wood. These two, with Norwegian names, will toe the face, guarding it from any man.











Augur

The pheasants would be in an arc, across cardboard that held oil on the garage floor. Wings pulled back, legs stretched, a glare on the beak and over the eye, light from a rafter.

This I’d known of birds.

My father and Bill Hondel were young men, their quiet newness behind knives. They’d bring skin and feather back, cleaning the blade, finish each one. Everything removed from muscle.

They’d work on knees, still hot, the smell clinging. I’d touch my father’s shoulder not telling me to back off or away. He’d slow, so I could see the knife.








Thomas Cook: I divide my time. I remember reading William Faulkner in springtime and Ernest Hemingway in winter. In the business of waiting tables, there are no winners or losers. My chapbook, Homespun, is available from Spout Press, a nifty little enterprise out of Minneapolis, Minnesota.


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