Matthew Vetter

At fifty-six, having left my mother, my father buys a motorcycle. I imagine him because it is the son’s sorrowful assignment to imagine his father: there, hunched on his mount, with black boots, with bad teeth, between shifts at the mill, ripping furrows in the backroads, past barn and field and silo, past creek and rock, past the brown mare, sleek in her impertinence, never slowing until he sees the bull.   He stops, pulls his bike to the side of the road, where golden rod and clover grow, walks up to the fence, admires its horns, its wet snout snorting and blowing its breath, its girth, its trampling of small wild flowers.