Seventy

Death plucks my ear/says, Live/I am coming.

—Virgil

See that fox pelt, tire pummeled dry and the one red tuft wind wakened and the way those llamas on the farm all quick look east-west-north-south and then bisect the angles, nose up at some coyote’s faraway funk. Voles skittering through the crackling dead grass, the old red logging truck, buckshot pattern on the driver’s door and me now looking through the circle made by the crane’s calipers back into life at some rustling thing — that zigging rabbit and somewhere the deep throated bark of a shepherd surrounded by the manic yappers, some kind of glee I’m being offered, some kind of wake up and get my feet dirty, pulling me up this village road after my long sleep, not Van Winkle’s — I’ve been here all along — but what a here this is now, at seventy, the acolytes in black who’ve been putting out the candles behind me have gone on ahead: Hurry, they say, You can count the days left by the number of things left after you’ve swept out the crap. How much room there is now. The less of me the more of everything worth loving: that star, that stone being rolled clack-thump by snowmelt down the widening stream, the way that woman lifts the hair off her neck in the heat — I want to blow on it, like a coal.