He could pull ancestral messages from

this kind of weather.

Last snow in brittle, crusty piles

like garbage his neighbor 

would burn last. 

He would’ve stood near the road,

near the long driveway to the gun club across the street,

where shots cracked the air throughout the day, 

and told me this earth fogging

at our ankles would be the sign 

for his ancestor farmers to do something.

I can’t remember what. 

Leaving later, I’d be halfway down his street

when I’d remember some thing I left behind.

After I found the untethered thing, he made me sit

on the hardwood floor and count to ten, that calm number,

before he let me drive off again. 

Was it a carnation of superstition from

his arrangement of country ones.

He wasn’t a godfather of mindfulness movements, 

even if this worked. But maybe he was giving

my grandmother another moment

to look at her forgetful grandson

before he returned over the hill where

the fog was gone now and the shotgun

in the distance snapped his mind empty again.  

---

Joe Bueter lives and writes in central Pennsylvania. His poetry has been published in Nashville Review, Vassar Review, Confrontation, Parcel, and others. He has also participated in the Joaquin Miller Cabin Poetry Series in Rock Creek Park, Washington, DC.