Robert W. King
Minutes
He got the story from the coroner:
the tipped tractor, the neighbor pinned two hours
before he was absent enough to be noticed
and then found, and then too late. The point,
my friend says, is that he'd been dead only
fifteen minutes. We both repeat the time,
nodding at the number. Now, he tells me,
he always tells his wife where he will be
and when to expect him, and I agree,
not wanting to die throughout that hour
until the time it doesn't matter how long,
how far away the house is, how wide the field.
Bio
Robert King's first book, Old Man Laughing (Ghost Road Press), was a finalist for the 2008 Colorado Book Award in Poetry and his second, Some of These Days, will appear in 2013 from Conundrum Press. He recently won the Grayson Books Chapbook Competition with Rodin & Co. He lives in Greeley, Colorado, where he directs the website www.ColoradoPoetsCenter.org.