Mule

             Patched up, canvas-frayed

and stitched around the seams: your heart …

(I’m not talking poetry here

but infarct and scar tissue.)

            Crumple-tough

as the leaky grey knapsack you’d never get rid of;

tool bag, greasy with touch, clanking

with implements you can’t name—can’t carry it,

             can’t lay it down

              or it you. Stout

heart. A quarter of a century since it first stopped.

My new life, you said, counting days

then years. Knuckle-tapping your chest:

             No worries

about old age, you said. This’ll see to it.

Wrong. Dear heart, old retainer. Out,

way out on some frontier-too-far of the empire

             I see tracklessness, rock-scrub

              and the one

survivor of the massacre, limp, speechless,

strapped to the back of the mule

he’d whacked and chivvied for years

             as it dawdled and stumbled

and kicked back; now, unstoppable, faithful

beyond sense or pity, it plods,

toting him back to tell, to try to tell,

             where words might go but not return.