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