So now I'm going to dig through this
and try to find a poem that isn't about my mother.
My God, why is it so hard?
OK, here's one.
In a field, three boys drunk laid down
in a flatbed of a truck, where one falls asleep
and one, the same one, three years from the starless night
will find himself on his knees, licking
the folds of a strange man's wallet,
and one, a different one, will be
found in an abandoned house shaking,
fleas running up and down his body,
and the third will wait trial for the murder of his father.
However, these stories haven't happened.
Tonight we are safe from the shrinking wicks of our fates.
Together for what I assume is the last time among the stocks,
when one, you can guess which, as a joke
pointed his father's gun at the boy snoring in the flatbed,
and then shot into the crisp black air again
and again jolting the night awake,
and we laughed until the sirens chased us out from that field,
leaving behind what we could only describe then
as a mallards carcass, but know now as something not
unlike childhood, but much more like a ghost that waits
for you in an idling truck outside your bedroom window,
or a dream where you laughed yourself awake
but can't remember why.