“They are pumping shit from this pit

to the one up in High Country,”

And I wonder how I’ll know these things

After you are gone.

Peeling red barns bulge with ambling cows

Chewing their cud. Tails swish. Flies buzz.

Jerseys and Holsteins graze a pockmarked path

To the greener end of the pasture.

I say nothing.

A patchwork hill rises among a bevy of others

Crowned with white capped silos and

Sprawling paint chipped homes.

The lines in the field mean something to you,

But I can’t remember what.

Will I remember any of it?

Secret roads connecting hidden meadows?

The way the boundaries of these fields have passed

Like you, from one farm to another

Through decades and generations?

Will the hills themselves ache for your loss?

Weep black mud tears in lightning shaped rivulets?

Crack open slim, dark ravines that echo

Stories of the thrum of your tractor,

Or the pounding of your feet on the earth?

“A deer,” you say between coughs,

Gesturing weakly toward the window.

I see it grazing, and the others too–

Lined up waiting at the edge of the woods.

Songbirds circle, lost for a place to land.