THIS POEM

After long months of silence,
a poem from my son. My sickbed
vibrates into mountains we must

pass to reach him, by hues of
earth and stone, where wind binds
grasses, sending secret dwellers

scurrying through sagebrush, white
pines Christmasing the distance,
deciduous branches fingering the mauve-

white cloudlets as we drive in
spitting distance of earth bloodied
with iron clay. In these words I feel

the wrenching of the gut as his
grown son moves off into a rite
of passage of his own, sending his

father eavesdropping by an empty room.

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