Of Two Lives and One Man

Of Two Lives and One Man

(“I die every day! That is as certain, brothers and sisters, as my boasting of you—a boast that I make in Christ Jesus our Lord.” 1 Corinthians 15:31)

Oklahoma’s sun is a hot towel sauna
that makes your sweat bead up and fill
every pore until the skin skips breathing,
absorbing each ray of heat magnified by
the tiny beads’ lenses on every square inch
of uncovered skin.

A hod-carrier from early morning until
the afternoon cured his legs like the mortar
he carried; the bricks were stacked; play-school
children’s pyramids. The only definition: wider
at the bottom than at the top. And I would carry
nine at a time, a full brick-tong’s load, to the
top of the scaffolding where, three stories high,
he dropped them, and like a baby monkey, climbed
the scaffolding to begin again; and again, 20 times
again. Three years married, four years out of high school,
the young scholar sweat his muscles dry.

The Northwest’s drizzle is a cold rain forest
that leaves the damp on every roof green, moss thicker
than the sod by April. Thirty-seven years married,
forty out of high school,
the air always sounds like a trout stream at night
just beyond a canvas-tent’s walls.

A chronic head-tong grabbed him just about each ear,
and the step from bed to floor is the greatest attempt
of the day. From mid-morning when pain has settled
to the sound of distant gongs, until mid-afternoon when
it arrives again full-on, he tries, like he did decades ago,
to simply sweat out one more our of the day. But, his
mind a fog,
his head fully vised,
his ideas old,
his hopes sold for a simple day when five minute phone calls
do not drain what was empty a full hour before.

And though we all begin to die once we cough into being,
and though God knows I could never leave the love I’ve known,
I would question Job, except he had an ending while he lived;
Lord of All, hear the whining drill that barely shows upon my face.