He sat the beer down, and pulled a cigarette
from the crumpled pack on the table.
The pack is as red as his spit,
and white as his face after morning coughs
squeeze his blood into the bathroom sink,
a giant invisible fist gripping hard,
forcing the last resistant drop
out of an almost empty tube of paste.
Drawing in a lung full of stress,
he exhales it out with a sigh of relief,
and the smoke around his face lifts
and shows a beautiful smile in the midst
of a bristly rugged surface, a meadow
uncovered when the morning fog
on a treed mountainside lifts.
A continuity of this land, he traded
pieces of his soul like many who
came before, worked the land,
took from the hills, and in return
became part of this earth, part of the
clay and soil of the land. His laugh,
rough as boots on gravel. The lines
around his eyes count years. His face
a dark red stain in igneous rock, iron
mined and forged, shackled to his leg,
binding him to this place, these people,
and life in these hills.
And when the cough starts we look away.
Embarrassed because its not one of us.
Ashamed because we're glad,
it is not, (we are not cowards)
one of us. (we men of the hills)
We raise our glasses to our captain, striking out ahead,
discovering the pain, marking the trail
so the rest of us know,
where to avoid the dangerous paths,
where people lose their scalps,
are robbed of their hunger,
and where a man is able to
tell the future with no uncertainties
of what lies around the next curve,
and beer makes us brave,
but it only lasts a little while.