3050. BUT FREDDY, THE LEAVING IS DRY

BUT FREDDY,
THE LEAVING IS DRY

Barnyard, cardyard, shovel shed.
The place where the suffering
animals frothed and shimmered.
I always stayed aware of the gleam,
even as a boy, watching the calf waste
away, eating the gloam from the ribbons
of whey. My Coleman Lantern, as I
remember it, I kept it lit for what seemed
like endless hours of days, as the animals
groaned, the Spring birthings went on, and
those who wouldn't make it prepared themselves
for death. It was like that then, even two hundred
miles away, at my Bradford County home. Dry as a
hat, Warren's barn, burning, just toppled and fell
with a fiery crash - everything streaming out
at once. Flames and animals, the women and men,
all those Pennsylvania people with pails and buckets.
They looked in wide-eyed awe, as everything around
them, everything they'd ever known, burned away
before them, finally, to an absolute nothing at all.