Wild Flowers

By Matthew Vetter Matthew Vetter

At fifty-six, having left my mother,

my father buys a motorcycle.

I imagine him because

it is the son’s sorrowful assignment

to imagine his father: there,

hunched on his mount,

with black boots, with bad teeth,

between shifts at the mill,

ripping furrows in the backroads,

past barn and field and silo,

past creek and rock,

past the brown mare,

sleek in her impertinence,

never slowing until he sees

the bull. He stops, pulls

his bike to the side of the road,

where golden rod and clover grow,

walks up to the fence, admires

its horns, its wet snout snorting and blowing

its breath, its girth, its trampling

of small wild flowers.

Biography

Poet Matthew Vetter earned an MFA in creative writing from Spalding University. His poems have been published in the Louisville Review and Midwest Quarterly, and have been featured in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry column. Vetter is a PhD candidate in English at Ohio University. He co-writes a blog with Jill Koren.

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