Psalm for My Father

Let the russet chair with its upholstered curves remain for a while as he shaped it, removed to a spot by windows laced over and tall.

Let the coming winter stay longer on mountaintops: October, the month of his birth, crisp slowly into frost, stubble fields holding onto gold before the turn to fallow.

Allow us time to watch a lowering sun shoot back prisms, faint ice etching long needles across the water trough, mountain spring water still trickling in as it has all my years, though irrigation ditches he cut in pasture no longer flow.

In the necessary wait for morning and motion, let us open to what darkness can give . . . the moving metaphors of earth, its core of heat, the underground rivers that stream beneath us.