Easter Sunday

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life,

what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear.

Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?… 

Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?”

---Matthew 6: 25, 27

I had a marine and an engineer in the bar today

for the first two hours. I was hungover.

The marine said we don’t work

the way they work in Afghanistan. He told me

he watched a couple guys every day in the desert

digging a hundred mile trench for water

by hand.

“And we bitch whenever anything breaks down

for even a minute.” He spent time in

Alaska, North Dakota, Russia, and Japan.

Wherever he goes, he said

all he needs is trees, mountains, and water.

One of my regulars came in

and told the story of the dead mouse in the growler.

After the brewer came out of the brewhouse holding

a paper towel with a skeleton on it

the guy whose growler it was said, “Well,

I’ll take the Brown in there.”

A woman from Helena was upset when I told her

she couldn’t take her beer outside:

“You guys are really uptight here.”

Wallie and Anita and Pat and I

talked of our gratuitous exorbitant defense spending

and then the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus says

“When you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans,

for they think they will be heard because of their many words.

Go into your room, close the door and pray.”

I went

across the street to pick up my dinner.

There was a guitarist singing with only one person in the bar.

Paul came in towards the end.

He told me how to hunt mountain lions with a dog

and how he met Freddy Mercury

a month before he died.

Paul helped release

Innuendo in the States,

and Freddy
was so grateful.

Paul
left.

I locked up,

mopped

and drove home with a little orange glow left
reflected in the lake.