Thursday, March 8, 2012

Little Black Cat

Perched on your shoulder

As you worked. Or bushhogged

The verge. The tractor clanking,

His unsheathed claws dug in

To your Carhartts. Balanced

Like a small branch in the wind.



Hooking upside down along a beam

To the barn swallow’s nest

A basket of wattle and spit.

Raking out the fledglings

With one pronged paw

While I gathered them up and swatted him

In full knowledge that nightfall

Would find his jaws feathered.



Cairo, we called him, for his old

Three legged Pa, Egypt. He’d leap

From stall to stall in a fit

Of gaiety. Nestled on the bay mare’s withers

As she chomped oats from a bucket.

Fearless as a falcon. Jade eyed.



An onyx streak as we mowed

The meadowgrass, timothy and

Florets of sweet alfalfa.

The barncats breviary, a daily recital

Of rounds, prowling each pasture

For field mice and shrews.



We missed him gradually.

No small black flash

Underfoot in the straw. No

Riveting purr to the backstroke.



Chores blurred his memory.

Watering the horses, liming

The dry lot, trimming the tiny hoofs

Of the new foals.



Wintertime, tossing down hay from the loft,

We found him pressed like a flower in a bale

Perfectly flattened, a silhouette

Of a little black cat.

Plain Spoke

Black Stallion

The stallion was here again, you tell me,
Peering in the front windows, pacing
Up and down. I wasn’t home.

The other times I caught him; he came
Right to me, soft-eyed as I snapped
The shank to his halter and led him back.

He belongs to the new people who bought Grant’s
Place. It’s a different culture, I tell my neighbor Aimee,
Who disapproves of the way the horse is tied

For hours to a tree, how they gallop him
Up and down the asphalt drive. I say
Useless to call the county—he’s in good

Flesh, hair-coat shiny, bright-eyed,
Well fed, groomed, newly shod.
She says the man hits him, well I’ve hit

Plenty of horses in my time and say so
Trying to be fair. Today, he had no halter, his owner yelling
And brandishing a whip. The stallion

Took one look and took off.
I guess he caught him because when I was out
In the barn tonight, I could hear the man shouting

In a language I don’t understand
And the stallion shrieking
In a desperate soprano and I’m thinking

One of them is going to get killed.



Midwestern Gothic


Sunday, December 11, 2011

Witch

Leggy, incorrigible from the outset
Whaling on her patient dam
Or sucking noisily. She cracked
Your sternum when you were
Tailing her as I drew blood.

Striking or wheeling for a kick
Rearing when the buyer came to look.
Breaking her, Pedro said she’ll win
With this temper. That name.

When she hit the track
The trainer shook his head “She
Clears the shedrow when she comes down
The aisle” Shaking her nose chain
Like a castanet.

Bullet works in the morning
That secular time when ecstasy
Did not roll her eyes.

Her first start she flew so wide
She ran a mile or more in six furlongs.
The railbirds shrank into the stands
Making a cross by her number.

Impertinent but cunning when she kindly took
Sugar from our hands, we locked on hope
Dashed in the afternoon
When the church of spectators prayed
And shouted in tongues over their tickets
And she went mad.

The music in her head
Clamoured for her to dance
To dwell or prop or buck
Whatever a sorceress wants.

A bolter the stewards said.
Irascible in the gate
A danger on the track. Maenad I birthed
That Easter morning. Ruled off.
My dark and lovely
Filly with a snip.


Quest

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Peasant Life after Chagall

Feed sugar beets to the white horse,
Dance on the blue mountain,
Talk beneath the lamp
On a winter evening.

Let the little horse
Draw your grandfather up to the moon.
A kind man guides his wagon.

You are not sorry.
Your red cap and pug nose
Prepare you to tackle anything.
What do you have to know?

Only this. Let a tree grow in your mind,
Follow the footprints
Leading up to the sky. It is your life
Ahead of you.

Friday, August 26, 2011

The Circus Rider after Chagall

The red horse nods its panache
rolls its woman's eye.
The rider's acrobatic
stance defies the grave

laws of balance. Gaudy slipper hooked
over the left shoulder. One legged flamingo.
Right arm forming a classic gesture

of ballet. The horse rocks on
as the full moon dangles
from a laurel branch
like the hazardous white fruit

that can only be plucked by the angel
flying with moth wings
glued to a mortal body.

The circus is the sensual
ring in which love enacts
its risks, a production
of gasps, thrills.

The angel's arms open wide.
It has fallen in love with a painted horse
with the seduction of clowns.

O, it has fallen
like moonlight onto the earth
its wings burning off

its body becoming
three rings of joy.

<i>Chagall Poems</i>

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

In the Album

IN THE ALBUM


At the third switchback we pull off
where the honeymooners fell
and I step forth as always onto the peninsula of rock
to pose against a jackpine sticking out
of the cliff face like an arthritic finger
pointing to disaster. The sky is always
cobalt with thunderheads building
to the west, the pinecones underfoot, a jay
chattering and with my jackknife I carve
my initials once again onto the lodgepole.

There's a bottomless lake, an abandoned mine
with fool's gold and rose quartz. There's a child
making snowballs in July, bear sign,
a clawed tree, an elk in the mist of a meadow
and stepping stones across Rock Creek
where we fish for cut-throat trout.

The past preserved in photographs,
the falls in the backgroud, up close there's me
on a sorrel mustang about to lope off
into the rest of my life.

Eclipse

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

This Place Where I Am Happy

THIS PLACE WHERE I AM HAPPY


The dark spreads its palm
From nowhere to nowhere,
Outside, the frozen crust
Of the barnyard spangles
Under the arclight. Snow
Captions fences neatly.
Each footprint jails a shadow.

The horses stamp in their straw,
Muzzles a penumbra
Of crystal, breath white balloons
In which no language hovers.
Their droppings golden stones,
Eyes of dreamy amber. The cinder block walls
Sparkle as cold bites through
Sinking red and congealed
In the window-hung bulb.

The black wind hurts my face
As I trudge houseward tugging the metal pail
That dances empty from its bail.

Nothing cries from rooftops
Or circles out of trees.
Cats huddle in the loft
Frostnipped ears rounding
To the horses’ even breaths
And the shift of massive haunches.

I halt, set down the pail
In a white expanse that is perfect
As long as I do not move.

South Dakota Review