One Poem

By Robert Wood Lynn

The Summer After the Winter I Taught You How to Start a Fire

You asked me what I knew about thermals—
heat’s tendency to rise, cool, fall again and so 
I showed you how to recognize the circle 
of turkey vultures over our neighbor’s field 
as a clue another calf had died. Immediately
you declared yourself the Detective of All Dead 
Things. Something’s dead, you’d say, squinting 
skyward. Case closed. That’ll be fifty dollars. 
It was one of your better jokes and as with all jokes
funny at first then a little less until repeated only 
as an epitaph for how funny it once was. 
Fifty American dollars. This debt smoldering 
like your anger after I told you the words 
I love you work the same way. I was careful 
to say so in the joking tone reserved 
for the parts of this living too disappointing 
to speak plain. Something’s dead, you’d say, 
a skill precisely too late to be of any use. 
Same as me here explaining the joke, the check 
I’d mail if I had your new address.


About the author:

Robert Wood Lynn is the author of Mothman Apologia, forthcoming in 2022 from Yale University Press, which was selected by Rae Armantrout for the 2021 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. He splits his time between Brooklyn, New York and Rockbridge County, Virginia.