You never wrote the small green book
like the poems of Edward Thomas.
It was a book I dreamed.
But watching the green report of your heart
on the monitor it came to me as I stood
like one of the doctors in my cap and gown,
home, where you've lived like a bachelor
at the far end of the house,
there is a green diary:
the book of the deer, the bear and the elk,
with snapshots of Julian and Bob and Harry,
old hunting friends
dead as the game strung up on poles
or drooped across fenders.
I think you are the only one left.
And still you fight to stay,
breathing the scorched air of the burn ward,
the sweet stink of your own charred flesh.
Stepfather, don't go.
Seventy-three years is not the end of the book,
the letters you never wrote,
because even before you blistered your hands
the act of writing pained you.
It took four shots to bring it down.
Your father never praised you.
Rising from dinner that night he beckoned
toward the woodshed where the skinned deer
hung draped in burlap.
Then he whipped you with a belt.
"Don't ever bring home meat
shot up like that!
One bullet is enough."
I saw you kill a running buck
at three hundred yards with one shot.
It's a brutal art that fathers pass to sons.
When the propane tank ignited
you took the flaming cylinder in your arms
like a lover
and fought it out the door.
Now you dream each night of the trailer burning.
She was not burned like you—
twice, and three times, for your care.
Now the deer are safe from us,
I have one photograph to add to our book:
a doe running through a field.
My best shot.
Somewhere in the grass behind her
a fawn is hiding.
You can't see it,
but it's there waiting for its mother
to draw us away.
Later, she'll return
and the two of them will be saved.
Stepfather, Father, be like the fawn.
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