Future

The skeleton of a horse, still noble

in a museum in Indiana, a century dead

and its service for the North long over;

or a stuffed St. Bernard in a monastery

in the Alps, honored for the near frozen

it saved from the snow; or something

modest, a two-headed rabbit packed

in a jar—so those friends he had lost or

were dispersed, buried, given to science,

how much better to have them stuffed,

mounted, fixed in a museum: One reading

a good book as he strokes his mustache;

a girl laughing as she flips off a bottle cap.

A favorite place to walk at the start of day,

running his fingers over the glass cases, like

seeing friends who can give advice almost.

Then a chair where he’d sit in the evening,

reading the paper by a lamp, a little music,

no one speaking but companionable, the world’s

ruckus shut out. Hard not to go more often,

harder each time to leave. These imaginings

that grow as he gets older on how the future

might work out: ambulance rejected, doctors

sent packing. Only others would call it death.