Mere Humans
Tink shouted, “Did you hear my bad news?” I turned
from bucking up firewood and killed the engine.
How different he looked, our tough old bantam
neighbor – a rascal, but stolid as stone.
Here stood a suddenly tinier version.
No one in town would believe he’d cry.
Things had to be bad. He told me why:
“Mike’s gone. Some business called … aneurism.”
I caught my breath. Mike? His grandson?
Fallen at forty. Tink and Polly
had practically raised him up from a schoolboy.
(There were troubles with the in-between generation).
At 96, Tink died last year,
I still see oak sawdust pooled at his feet.
I couldn’t believe he’d actually weep.
Two-stroke exhaust fumes loitered on air,
no matter I’d choked the saw dead quiet.
Mosquitoes strafed us. And I remember
Mike passing our house in the prior November,
trailed by the 6-point buck he’d shot.
Two flecks of blood had dried on one cheek,
and in spite of the chill, I watched him sweat
from dragging that whitetail out of our woods.
For years he’d been bigger than Grandpa Tink.
So was the deer. (Mike gave our family
good venison backstrap later that autumn.)
Who’d predict I’d go over to Tink and hug him?
Not even I. I’m surprised he let me.
How long did he soak my shoulder that way?
Long enough, it seems, for me to sense
something like splendor in his awkward clench
by which I feel shocked and blessed to this day.