Why We Work

Why We Work

Young deer standing in headlights

in ditch below cliff

cars coming both ways

                                  W. S. Merwin

The day the news came about you

and the way you died we’d just made

the hay begin to make.  The sky

was quiet, the way a guy would want it,

and the field was dry enough and the sun

was come like some controlled reply—like

it has to happen this way., like once the match

was struck and held out to the fuse

there wasn’t a boot heavy enough or

a foot fast enough to make it go out,

to stop the first pause, you know the one

I’m talking about, once up and under

cover it’s as if some decision is still

being asked to be made: are you sure

you want to do this?  It’s how I imagine

pilots flying high over Hiroshima, so

high they don’t know anything but plots

and clouds maybe, but not people, not

people who are going to the barber, people

who are going to the temple, people who

are going to work going to war and do they

do.  Once the grid’s in sync with their belly

do they hover over the release button do they ask

what happens after I light this match?

Was the boy who fueled you head to toe

with some unknowable immolent as random

and homeless as he thougth you were?  Did he 

come on to you

like regret, cataract blind and out

of his mind?   I want t think that.  I want

to think I have faith enough in sanity

that her hands are clean after a good day

of honest work pushing like I do through tall grass

making hay.  It was just a foggy enough

morning—burning off by the time I let down

the first circling blades, their spin set to taking

it all down.  What was now waist high had started 

in May and now into and past July it was flat as battle-

field dead.  Quiet aside from the swallows and crows

glowing black against the gold.  Truth be told I remember

them the most—those crows—their thermal

circling.  I hated knowing a group

like that is called a murder.  I hated knowing

intelligent birds are herded into imagined facts

by men who know nothing but fear

and fire.  Noting but laying away charred

matches whose heads still glow

with their brief requirement.  Like yours had to

have.  If, sleeping, he poured from toe to brain

he held to your feet, and you, heroin asleep

only dream now, never seized another awake

it stands to it your face goes last.  We cut everything

off below the knee and the lips that touch

the dirt that made them glisten with melting

fat.  Is this why we work?  To walk out after

the cruelty of such news about you, to finger the grain

in the hay and have faith that this dying—this one—

will be put up and seasoned, bale after bale

to be chewed and regurgitated, chewed

and ruminated into anything other than bile,

that the purpose of your life was more

than a random man lighting you on fire

under that bridge and another random man

finding your smoke, your coat, your one

cast off unfillable shoe…