The cow pasture and starlings
that settle all at once like a blanket,
dark raisins over the cows' heads,
*
lone goose, flying down river
third violin, does it hope to catch up
*
did it not notice the gathering,
others heaving themselves from the pond?
*
third violin in the shadow of
the violas, who would like to be a viola
*
rich-voiced as a blue-tick coonhound.
*
In February, sun edges the tree trunks
like a talent still to show itself,
maybe the third violin would slide into
the seconds,
*
the adolescent in "Personal Use Typing"
realize she could slow down and make no mistakes,
*
an acceptable skill
for the world of work.
*
When a new chicken was introduced
she was first boss of the flock but now they all
get along: scrutinize my boots,
mittened hand reaching into the grain pail,
*
the radius of a white bowl.
*
To see them together is to forget
one was the boss, one ate a mouse,
one was intent on finding seeds
*
in the curved wrists of the maple roots.
*
The latch on the front door opens
as you bring in firewood, blows open
the back door
*
sends cats up the walls of the mudroom
to cling to the shelf
with its faded bottle of soap bubbles,
*
an empty wand, frozen, open-mouthed,
*
March, all that deceptive light
but no fruits yet.
From
FIELD
Spring 2018
http://www2.oberlin.edu/ocpress/
Because I’d done wrong I was sent to hell,
down black steps to the airless tombs
of mothballed contraptions and broken tools.
Piled on a shelf every daffodil bulb
was an animal skull or shrunken head,
every drawer a seed-tray of mildew and rust.
In its alcove shrine a bottle of meths
stood corked and purple like a pickled saint.
I inched ahead, pushed the door of the furthest crypt
where starlight broke in through shuttered vents
and there were the shears, balanced on two nails,
hanging cruciform on the white-washed wall.
And because I’d done wrong I was sent
to the end of the garden to cut the hedge,
that dividing line between moor and lawn
gone haywire that summer, all stem and stalk
where there should have been contour and form.
The shears were a crude beast, lumpen, pre-war,
rolling-pin handles on iron-age swords,
an oiled rivet that rolled like a slow eye,
jaws that opened to the tips of its wings
then closed with an executioner’s lisp.
I snipped and prodded at first, pecked at strands,
then cropped and hacked watching spiders scuttle
for tunnels and bolt-holes of woven silk,
and found further in an abandoned nest
like a begging bowl or a pauper’s wreath,
till two hours on the hedge stood scalped
and fleeced, raw-looking, stripped of its green,
my hands blistered, my feet in a litter
of broken arrows and arrowhead leaves.
He came from the house to inspect the work,
didn’t speak, ran his eye over the levelled crown
and the shorn flanks. Then for no reason except
for the sense that comes from doing a thing
for its own sake, he lifted me up in his arms
and laid me down on the top of the hedge,
just lowered me onto that bed of twigs,
and I floated there, cushioned and buoyed
by a million matchwood fingertips,
held by nothing but needling spokes and spikes,
released to the universe, buried in sky.
