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Bill Burchfield

Dick Barnes 
When they told Bill Burchfield he had lung cancer
it made him nervous so he smoked a lot.

Our hospital room got to be like a bus station
on the prairie in winter, but I didn't mind.

In his youth, in the Marines, he went to China
and Tibet, hunted the Himalayas for blue sheep

on a slope so steep if you hit one it would slide
for miles out of sight, beyond reach, but he thought

the guides would go back later and get them
for their families to eat.

Doctors coming in so smug, cut and drug
is all they know - well, that and radiation.

I took Bill's advice, not to go for the operation
they said I needed. "Some of these guys,"

he whispered to me, "are knife
happy."
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