for Troy Gustafson

If you’re standing within swinging distance,

you’re standing too close, you’d say, shoulders squared.

But you were all bluster. In Nebraska parlance,

it really meant I want to embrace you as a brother.

You knew the same back roads I traveled and forgot,

those gravel barrens leading mostly nowhere,

to overgrown cul-de-sacs or abandoned feed lots,

the kind urbane folk rightfully fear.

To say we held debates would be a slander.

You would only offer: Speak plain. You’d say:

With your words, you could bring many over

to Christ. I was too arrogant in those days

to parse my pain from my avarice,

too cocksure to accept what was

the deepest embrace: the promise beyond

brotherhood—of stewardship and sacrifice.

Your death has only hardened what was wrong

when I left my church in that corner of Kansas

too afraid to claim myself, too young

and unwilling to forgive my family

for their imperfections. One by one,

they are crossing over; any lingering grief—

any doubt their corporeal bodies

resurrect to light in paradise—

could now only be construed as mocking

the dead, or a disregard for the righteous—

or worse yet, a violation of the faith

you put in me with your embrace.