Northern Corn by Anders Carlson-Wee via Best New Poets 2012

Traveling alone through Minnesota
as the corn comes in. Steel silos filling
to the brim. Black trees leaning
off the south sides of hills as the cold light
falls slantwise against the gristmills.
You have allowed another year to pass.
You have learned very little.
But that little is what you are throwing
in the furnace. That little is stoking the dust-
coals of last year and burning something.
Burning blue. The ninety-year-old father
is bringing his crop in. He climbs
off the thresher, checks the engine,
moves an oak branch. He pours
rye whiskey from a thermos and sips
the lidless excess of his private noon.
The size of his hands. The size of one finger.
The flathead prairie of his calloused
thumb-pad. He lies awake in the middle
of the night and whispers something
and suddenly loves his son again.
The way excess falls through him.
The way oil runs down the Mississippi River
and remains on the surface and burns.
The father no longer breathing.
The respirator breathing. The father lying
in a hospital bed in a nightgown.
The plastic tubes and machinery.
The whole hospital breathing.
The janitor waxing the white-tile floors
at midnight while life is trying hard
to leave. You must go to your father
while he is still your father.
You must hold him. You must kiss him.
You must listen. You must see the son
in the father and wonder. You must admit
that you wonder. Stand above him
and wonder. Drop his swelled-up hand.
Whisper something. Now unplug the machine.