I work from 5 am to 7.30 pm

drink some bottled water in my idling Honda

in the backyard by the goat corral

where the darkness spars with garage floodlights

and the raccoons and rats alike await my departure to begin their allstock feed supper

while I change the bandage on a donkey’s sore

under the light of the Odin’s wagon asterism

that lit the way for a thousand of my forebearers 

as they struggled alone through the frosty nights

in the woods of the Forest Finns

where the last ancestor has been buried already

in our coffin of steel

•