My brother said this poem to me on the phone.
I was in such a fever dream writing these little poems,
and I don't usually do this, but I fact-checked some of them.
I don't recommend this.
Don't do this if you write poems.
But I called up my brother and I said, hey,
can I run some of these past you?
And he said, yeah, sure.
And then he said this poem to me on the phone.
I'm not joking.
He just said the poem almost verbatim to me on the phone.
It's called Ground Guy.
Renee and I were doing some limb work,
Noah says, on the tree out front,
that twisty pine at the corner of the house,
taking a couple of widows off it and Dad drives up,
drunker than I've ever seen him, or close, in a red Ford Focus,
gives me the biggest hug he can considering
he dropped 20 pounds since I last saw him,
and I'm the ground guy holding the rope.
Puts his arm around my shoulder and just kind of stands
there, neither of us saying a word,
not knowing after two or three minutes,
he'll get back in the car and drive off,
last time I'll ever see him, because when
you're the ground guy, you got to focus
on the guy in the tree.
You mess up and that limb swings out and hits the line, bang,
the whole block goes dark.
Sometimes a poem finds you through another person's voice.
It's crazy.