Ginger’s Pasture
when old ned died, we had to drag
the horse’s body with a tractor to
a pit i had spent a day digging/ i
had loved that horse, and could not
shake the feeling that we were
hurting
him by dragging his dead weight
with a rope tied around his neck/ the
blue ridge is a place where death is a dime a dozen/ it is mainly buried but
it can find you, too, in the middle of
the vast dead and probing middle of the night/
you can fight death/ your neighbors will say look there at that old fool fighting death why would he do that/ i do not know, in fact, i have no wisdom to offer and less answers to the issues that plague a life than i did as a young man when i knew everything/
all i know is that pieces of me were buried, too, in that pasture in the blue ridge where ned had lived/