Tall and Tender Boys

Tall and Tender Boys

Tall and tender boys of the upper Midwest
Boys with huge veiny feet 
With which they shimmy up trees
Boys you worry are going to steal your girlfriend
But actually they’re always single because
They’re too particular
About how say to properly care
For knives and their bedtime rituals
Are so complex that at lights out
They turn away from their partners in annoyance
When they do make love is when
They become legends
There they are oblivious to it
Dripping in flannel at the end of the bar
Except the only time their flannel drips
Is after some rainy chainsaw work
No they never stay in a relationship long
A sign it’s about over is when they start talking
About joining the monastery where
They go on retreat a few times a year
To sit with their huge feet bulging over the edges 
Of the thong sandals the monks wear 
These boys hunt deer but never  
In the way everyone else does
They kill them with an old-school bow-and-arrow
Or an addle-addle they carved by a wood stove
They can make you a mean venison chili
Then take you outside and show you
The constellations as they tell the stories
And they know how to run a generator
And they know a little wilderness first-aid
And they’ve spent time in the damnedest places
They once dated an older woman in Marfa
They were in Zuccotti Park during Occupy
They worked on a trail crew in the Tetons
In the Smokeys in the Adirondacks in the Cascades
I’ve been calling them boys they’re men but 
There is something maybe about them like
They think they killed their fathers
Or they need their mothers as much as 
They need their mothers to leave them alone 
You just feel it talking to them
About regenerative agriculture or the Biblical origins
Of the blues these boys who being 
Pacifists would never enlist but who need a war 
They pray they’re drafted
They think sometimes they’d rather die
For nothing than live like this