On two occasions you were seen, they said,
looking exactly as you did in life,

dressed in the same faded army fatigues

that were your preferred clothes for farm work. Once,
by your widow who for weeks following
your death woke from startled sleep

to the clear sound of your voice calling down
through dawn’s mist-lifted fields and echoing
in the dissolving chambers of a dream.

But once also by an old farmhand
stolid, trusty as a bolt, who’d succumb
to lung cancer soon after you had gone.

Both reports were nearly identical.
Late afternoon, you were high in the fields
surveying everything below, a long

look on your face as shadows lengthened
across the land’s furrows rows, the sun
burning dark orange as it does before

sinking into the sea. It was as if
even in death you could not enter rest,
as if the fields that you had plowed in life

—now left to your widow and youngest son—
remained of the deepest concern to you.
And so, for these, those fairer fields you forsook

for that “one” last deep longing backward look.