THE CUT

Visiting them one weekend, working together,

laughing, joking all the while, unique accents

from their home in the mountains and then

a cut happened when I was just three or four.

In the soil outback, digging dirt, wrapping burlap

around nursery stock, probably a little azalea.

A German Shepherd named King prowled around,

while a wild girl with straight, long blonde hair

rode in on a horse without a worry in the world.

It had to be the cut that sealed the moment

in my brain, and when I saw him with his full head

of thick white and gray hair, I remembered it jet black.

I remembered the black beard that perfectly framed

his sharp, angular young face with piercing eyes

and tanned skin, the man who always worked.

His arms were still sinewy, his body still wiry.

I was old enough to notice a sadness in his eyes.

And now, twenty years later, I saw the wrinkles

and lines etched in his tanned skin, all those years of

riding tractors under the blazing sun, in slicing wind.

He wrestled to pull his wallet from the pocket of his

steel gray Dickies work pants and strangely enough,

it matched the skin on his neck, the backs of his hands,

it was weathered too from riding along with him

in the fields and Interstates, and when the billfold opened,

he said to me in his Southern drawl,

“I always knew you’d come back to us.”

And with his driver’s license, and scraps of paper, there I was.

A picture of five year old me.