April in Wiltshire

It is April and time for lambing.

In the muddy blocks of farming squares

the full sheep kick each other to their breaths in labor

and begin birthing. Before midnight

I will go to those fields where, on this night,

a year ago, my friend and I last spoke.

It is because I am asleep that I feel his two hands.

I can watch them gesture like birds in landing

or touch them with my own. I do not wonder at them

not moving two springs later and it doesn’t matter

to me then how many seasons are left.

I have not done the math of grieving yet.

That summer became all summers—July, July, July

heard in each oar stroke, each scuff on land.

Out in the dark that first lambs have come.

My mother reaches her hands inside one sheep

and pulls out a small, wet body, twisted in growth.

In the shock of air, it presses tight to the space

it came from, and we watch before our torchlight

touches an orphaned lamb, its dead mother

spread in an arc on the ground. To give it a parent,

my mother kneels and slicks the lamb’s new pink skin

with the placenta of another female whose lamb

was stillborn. With the hot scent rubbed under

their noses, they find each other and do not notice us.

My hands are rough and cold and strong

as my friend’s when he still farmed and carried

the lambs into the ditches for their first feedings.

In my dreams tonight I will wonder at his dying young,

eternally twenty. He is part of this place here, in me,

but part of that. And in that photograph of us,

in that garden where things were growing,

he held me. How he lived when he lived.