The Family Man

‘Kids make a home,’ he said, the family mam,
speaking from long experience. That was on Thursday
evening. On Saturday he lay dead
in his own wood-shed, having blown away
all qualifications with a trigger’s touch

Kept his own counsel. It came as a surprise
to the fellows at work, indeed like nothing so much
as a direct snub that he should simply rise
from the table of humdrum cares and dreams and walk
(kindly, no man’s enemy, ready to philosophise)
over the edge of dark and quietly lie
huddled in the bloodied chips and the mornings’s kindling,
as though, in the circumstances, this was the proper end.

I liked him. He had the earmarks of a friend,
and it wanted just time, the one thing fearfully dwindling
on Thursday when we talked as people will talk
who are safe from too much knowledge.
The rifle’s eye
is blank for all time to come.
Rumours flower over his absence while I,
who hardly knew him, have learned to miss him some.