Mark Vinz

So many years later, the old dog still circles, head lowered, crippled by arthritis, nearly blind, incontinent. We repeat the litany, as if we need convincing that the end is right. I'll get her an ice cream cone if you'll drive her to the vet, my wife says. So there we sit on the front steps with our friend, and in the car, as always, when she senses the doctor's office drawing near, she moans and tries to burrow underneath the seats. What remains, the memory of how she taught us all the way we need to learn to live with wasting. There we sit, together, one last time as all that sweetness slowly disappears.

This could be the town you’re from, marked only by what it’s near. The gas station man speaks of weather and the high school football team just as you knew he would— kind to strangers, happy to live here. Tell yourself it doesn’t matter now, you’re only driving through. Past the sagging, empty porches locked up tight to travelers’ stares, toward the great dark of the fields, your headlights startle a flock of old love letters—still undelivered, enroute for years.

Beyond the field of grazing, gazing cows the great bull has a pasture to himself, monumental, black flanks barely twitching from the swarming flies. Only a few strands of wire separate us—how could I forget my childhood terror, the grownups warning that the old bull near my uncle’s farm would love to chase me, stomp me, gore me if I ever got too close. And so I skirted acres just to keep my distance, peeking through the leaves to see if he still was watching me, waiting for some foolish move— those fierce red eyes, the thunder in the ground— or maybe that was simply nightmares. It’s getting hard to tell, as years themselves keep gaining ground relentlessly, their hot breath on my back, and not a fence in sight.

“Even when you are not in a room, you are in it, your voice everywhere.” –Bill Holm “Even when you are not in a room, you are in it, your voice everywhere.”–Bill Holm The message that’s recorded on the phone is unmistakably bad news, and then another call tells us it’s one we love— a sudden death while traveling, somehow appropriate for one who always seized life too completely to stand still. A door slams shut, a wall has dropped away, and once again I’m driven back to empty pages, insufficient words, to rooms he always filled on entering— rooms lined with books, piano music, and good friends who raise their glasses one last time. And now, as all the lights are blinking off in every prairie town we’ve ever loved, when all the toasts are made and songs are sung, when leaving is the only certainty, a single voice keeps echoing, along each dark, untraveled hallway of the heart.