Death, the most brutal enemy I have known. It was never easy to speak to you but now the words flow out of me like the Flat Stone river during spring time. I keep writing. The pen moves although it does not feel like my doing. the words seem vacant and dull next to the vast space you left behind in my life. It is a lie to say a man does not cry but I fight letting the emotions grab me. I blow out the candle and lie alone on our bed. Sleep is a distant memory now. A lesser man would drown himself in liquor. A lesser man would turn to ***** but I am not a lesser man. Tears came to me last night for the first time since I was a boy. I was lying alone in the shadows when I turned my head towards your pillow. Your scent washed over me, my soul and body ached as one and each muscle tensed as if a vice held me. I sobbed like a child fighting it at first with all my strength until I gave in. I slipped into that place between dreams and life. I floated then out of our window, out into the pouring rain and moonlight my spirit spread across the forest I hunted as a boy. I ran my fingers down each rabbit trail searching for you among the bristles and the thorns. I stretched my legs feeling the bark of each oak as if it were my own flesh. Into the soil. My lungs filled with fog and my eyes became stones. My forehead like marble against the mountainside.  My hair tangled and became clouds at the peak. I was no more, yet I breathed and my thoughts echoed inside me as a shout in the canyon. Each word sounding out as a bird's whistle and the cry of a hound, as the wind rushing through the leaves. It was there that I found you. Your scent like fresh strawberries and cut pine boughs. You were each blade of grass and I was each blade of grass. You were the mountain stream and I the stone made flat by your current. I communed with you as an old buck with a silver patch of hair adorning my chest and you the timid red fox watching me from the fallen log.
I awoke my face wet with tears and my body hot like a fever.
I am alone in this old house and the walls creak and my bones creak in lament to use.
I took my old service pistol in my hand felling it's cold weight against my palm.
I stand as if by some other man's command and walk out into the pouring rain.
Out past the barn and the silo. Into the fields with the weight of the pistol in my pocket.
Each heartbeat is one too many as I stand in the fields only half-harvested.
I laugh in the rain. The fields are seem as surprised as I am at your loss.
The cold barrel pressed against my temple.