Driving Upstate with My Father

at the end of a bad year. Trees begin
to outnumber houses. Rain turns to snow
as fields hang like paintings.
Dad fills his lip with chew, talks.
The truck is warm and rattles with tools.
Every so often we enter a silence
as he ends a story and readies the next,
about work, or money, or deer.
If I’m lucky he’ll share the good stuff
and tell me how he almost lost everything, or the time,
while teaching my uncle how to swing an axe,
he split his shin like celery, filling his boot
with blood. The best is when he forgets
he’s a man and tells me what he loves.
I carried a doe through the dark, he says,
and then describes the stars.