Out of the truck I am two feet in the rut, behind the Chevy, Uncle Terry lets the tailgate down and we slide the tools and supplies out, the ax is tall as my neck, it takes two hands to carry, walking in thrift jeans, stiff as plywood, across the clods and weeds of the cowpied pasture

He grew up on this ancient farm with a bull, a pyramid of wooden stairs for getting over barbed wire, the pasture is a swath of thistle where I bend to swing and chop, before they spread to neighboring fields, we gather stalks for the wheelbarrow, dumping them in a pile to be set alight

A water jug and a hand radio, our company for the battle ahead, the fireflies close in, the light flickers as we work far from each other

He moves towards me, watching in silence, and with a sweat beaded gasp says We’re not cutting those, nodding to my work, I follow him to a patch of thorn thick growth to swing and to have swung in the hot sepia dusk

Our beginning is neither whim nor calculation, I take a drink and feel the ice against my teeth.