Repose Of Needles Poem by Warren Falcon

for the Major


If you need to stand or lie
in the shade for awhile then
do so as farmers do, as does
my father who farms despair
in hot sun then lies beneath
pines in cooler shade to rest,
to dream that activity between
dirt and sky means some
lasting thing in its doing
though his ruined life cannot
make it right between clouds
and his obsession with weeds.

Between the garden and the
untilled woods he rests,
repose of needles and bark,
mid-day sun insisting its
question slowly.

Night dawning
he at last in darkness stands
returned from day, a practical
vision of green shoots to come
from blistered hands.

Up hill to the colder house,
he wills himself to life-enough,
speaks some words to wife,
arcs widely around silent wary
children and lives to be old.
His loss of memory leaves it
for others to forgive, to live on
in the rich rot of that ongoing
question which nurtures his
memory haltingly, gracefully, on.

Astonished, I have arrived at
love for him who hurt me most,
have learned to obey the odor
of decaying things compelling
hands to dirt. Within the dream
of staying, the tendril and the
heart, my aging body takes on
my father's form. I, too, like him,
am a farmer when I note how
it moves in its winding reach,
rooting, rising, giving horizon.