The Moonshiner’s Last Breath

The copper has been in the family
longer than most of the family,
which, when you think about it,
says something about both.

He works at night,
not for any romantic reason
but because that is when the smell
travels least,
and because the law here
sleeps deeply,
having concluded long ago
that no one important
is watching.

The fireflies, if you must know,
are not magical.
They are insects with a chemistry problem.
But they keep him company,
and he has come to expect them,
which is a kind of love
he would never call love
out loud.

The mash sighs in the pot.
The condenser ticks.
He moves without thinking,
having done this ten thousand times,
and thinks instead
about other matters,
his brother who died young,
his daughter who married
and stopped writing,
the dog he had to put down
last April
who had been better company
than most people.

At some point he sits
on the dock he built
or his father built
or his father’s father built,
nobody alive remembers,
and lets his feet hang
above water
that has been moving past this spot
for longer than there has been
a country to call it part of.

He pours a little
into a jelly jar.
It tastes like burning,
and then, a half second later,
like home,
which is, when you get down to it,
also a kind of burning.

He thinks about the dead.
Not visions. Not voices.
Just the place inside himself
where they used to make a sound,
which has gone quiet
in some of them
and not in others,
and he could not tell you
why one and not the other
if you held a gun to him,
which, where he lives,
has been tried.

He does not, contrary to what poems
about men like him often suggest,
want to walk into the river.
He just wants to sit here
a little longer
with the copper humming
and the dock holding
and the jar half full,
and not yet have to face
whatever the morning
intends to require of him.

First light comes softly,
without permission,
and he stands,
and his knees say
what knees say,
and he goes inside
to a kitchen
that has been waiting for him
the entire time
without saying so.