163 Animal poems

We pretended to know nothing about it. I withdrew to childhood training: stay out of swampy undergrowth, choked edges. This was around the time we were too cruel to kill the mice we caught, leaving them in the Have-a-Heart trap under the sun-burning bramble of rugosa. But moving up the trail, we caught a glimpse right at the start: the fox just over the hillock on the dune-side slope, spoiling the grass-inscribed sand. Neither of us looked— it seemed best to back away. On the dune’s steep side we surveyed what we’d come for: ocean’s snaking blues beyond the meadow, the silvered blade-like wands lying down. Lovely enough to hold ourselves to that view. But the currents of an odor wafted in and out, until the sweep of smell grew wider, wilder. The heat compounded, and ugliness settled its cloud over us, profound as human speech, although by then we were not speaking.

dear dusty moth wearing miller’s cloth, Sophia Nichols’ soft voice calls wings at dusk across railroads and sagebrush to lull me to sleep, ‘Come to these window corners, come, rest on my boy’s dreams and flight, come tonight’ 2 September 2002

The next morning I felt that our house had been lifted away from its foundation during the night, and was now adrift, though so heavy it drew a foot or more of whatever was buoying it up, not water but something cold and thin and clear, silence riffling its surface as the house began to turn on a strengthening current, leaving, taking my wife and me with it, and though it had never occurred to me until that moment, for fifteen years our dog had held down what we had by pressing his belly to the floors, his front paws, too, and with him gone the house had begun to float out onto emptiness, no solid ground in sight.

Perhaps she came down for the apples, or was flushed out by the saws powering the far woods, or was simply lost, or was crossing one open space for another. She was a figure approaching, a presence outside a kitchen window, framed by the leafless apple trees, the stiff blueberry bushes, the after-harvest corn, the just-before-rain sky, a shape only narrow bones could hold, turning its full face upward, head tilted to one side, as if to speak. I want my life back. Morning settles around her like a silver coat. Rustling branches, hooves in flight.

Perhaps to those familiar with their ways The sight would not have been so startling: A deer fording the Missouri in the early afternoon. Perhaps they would not have worried as much As I about the fragility of it all: Her agonizingly slow pace, the tender ears And beatific face just above the water. At one point she hit upon a shoal And appeared to walk upon a mantle, The light glancing off her thin legs and black hooves. I thought she might pause for a while to rest, To gain some bearings, but instead she bound Back in, mindful I suppose Of the vulnerability of open water. When she finally reached the island And leapt into dark stands Of cottonwoods and Russian olives, I swear I almost fell down in prayer. And now I long to bear witness of such things, To tell someone in need the story Of a deer fording the Missouri in the early afternoon.

It was an icy day. We buried the cat, then took her box and set fire to it in the back yard. Those fleas that escaped earth and fire died by the cold.

One tiny tree frog with big eyes sings happily, “Kokee! Kokee!” His brother comes to bother. Coquí doesn't push him. Coquí doesn't bite him. Coquí tells him, “Kokee-Kee! Kokee-Kee!” Two tiny tree frogs with big eyes sing happily, “Kokee! Kokee!”

After seven lean years we are promised seven fat ones, if the cows do not die first. Some care must be taken to prevent their demise in the scrub or the slaughterhouse. There must be enough bones to throw and to bury. The skull of a cow, I put it on. There are many strewn in the field, there has not been much rain. I look through the eyes, that is, my eyes replace the eyes that death has taken. I can see out or through. It is not a bad fate to be a cow, to be, at once, so awkward, so full of grace, so full of milk. Everywhere the udders are full, the teats are ready, the mouth of the calf is soft and deep. I would thrust my hand in it for the wet joy of being so used. My own breasts are marked from the time the milk came in too fast; I did not have time to grow to the moment of giving. It is fitting that beauty leaves such scars. Milk has passed through my fingers, has spurted through my fingers, but not once during these seven lean years.

All me are standing on feed. The sky is shining. All me have just been milked. Teats all tingling still from that dry toothless sucking by the chilly mouths that gasp loudly in in in, and never breathe out. All me standing on feed, move the feed inside me. One me smells of needing the bull, that heavy urgent me, the back-climber, who leaves me humped, straining, but light and peaceful again, with crystalline moving inside me. Standing on wet rock, being milked, assuages the calf-sorrow in me. Now the me who needs mounts on me, hopping, to signal the bull. The tractor comes trotting in its grumble; the heifer human bounces on top of it, and cud comes with the tractor, big rolls of tight dry feed: lucerne, clovers, buttercup, grass, that’s been bitten but never swallowed, yet is cud. She walks up over the tractor and down it comes, roll on roll and all me following, eating it, and dropping the good pats. The heifer human smells of needing the bull human and is angry. All me look nervously at her as she chases the dog me dream of horning dead: our enemy of the light loose tongue. Me’d jam him in his squeals. Me, facing every way, spreading out over feed. One me is still in the yard, the place skinned of feed. Me, old and sore-boned, little milk in that me now, licks at the wood. The oldest bull human is coming. Me in the peed yard. A stick goes out from the human and cracks, like the whip. Me shivers and falls down with the terrible, the blood of me, coming out behind an ear. Me, that other me, down and dreaming in the bare yard. All me come running. It’s like the Hot Part of the sky that’s hard to look at, this that now happens behind wood in the raw yard. A shining leaf, like off the bitter gum tree is with the human. It works in the neck of me and the terrible floods out, swamped and frothy. All me make the Roar, some leaping stiff-kneed, trying to horn that worst horror. The wolf-at-the-calves is the bull human. Horn the bull human! But the dog and the heifer human drive away all me. Looking back, the glistening leaf is still moving. All of dry old me is crumpled, like the hills of feed, and a slick me like a huge calf is coming out of me. The carrion-stinking dog, who is calf of human and wolf, is chasing and eating little blood things the humans scatter, and all me run away, over smells, toward the sky.

Oh, Unreadable One, why have you done this to your dumb creature? Why have you chosen to punish the coyote rummaging for chicken bones in the dung heap, shucked the fur from his tail and fashioned it into a scabby cane? Why have you denuded his face, tufted it, so that when he turns he looks like a slow child unhinging his face in a smile? The coyote shambles, crow-hops, keeps his head low, and without fur, his now visible pizzle is a sad red protuberance, his hind legs the backward image of a bandy-legged grandfather, stripped. Why have you unhoused this wretch from his one aesthetic virtue, taken from him that which kept him from burning in the sun like a man? Why have you pushed him from his world into mine, stopped him there and turned his ear toward my warning shout?