Excerpt from the book Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods

Landscape with Sheep and Deer


I remember the arrhythmia of their movement
across the drenched pasture,
stuttering by my father would say.
What I’m trying to say is remote as a cloud
passing through woods, his face
in a window above the pen,
a clot of feeling.

This must be about him, that man who kept them
jailed and fed, who would not segregate.
In his mind, they were one thing, moving through
one place: sheep of the earth,
the cloud-like sheep, and the earth-toned deer
that belonged to the sky.

Each morning, I filled the feed drum.
Each day, I unlocked the gate, meaning I slipped
a loop from one post to another. The slack
of their limbs meant hunger; their eyes coming toward me
was the anthem I lived by.

O bookish sheep, painterly deer.

Radiant heather and tiny white tongues of clover,
soil glittering with the misery of rain.

I felt something then
in the approximate bones of a field mouse,
horse flies spinning in the trough
alert to the softening presence in the yard.

I fought nothing.
Every morning, I woke up knowing who I was,
that the fence was real, its barbed wire,
those rusted knots, salt lick
glowing like a lamp.

And though I can still see pretty hooves lifting,
feel the purchase of the nozzle
firing fresh water,

I must have dreamt it.

Weren’t we always cold?
We wore no wool, had no money from schemes
of shearing and selling the stuff.

And if there were deer, wouldn’t they have leapt over?

How can I remember the gentle assemblage
of clucks and hums that drew them
if were no birth cries, not one buried?

I taste the odor of straw and millet released into fall,
the cursive of my father's burning cigarette,
muslin curtain parting.


Clinging

The dirty sheep cried all night for her mate. In her stall,
a comprehensible world of straw, mushrooms bluish in manure,
long hoof prints of her husband yesterday shuttled away
with three others. This, and the stubborn feathers of the grouse—
lilac, blue-black where it was hit. I’m here too, stripping
the bird of her magic: upside-down, she swings by the feet,
crease of blood on her neck, locket of heart rapt inside her breast.
Over still-wet fields, the lucky ones hobble toward the illusion
of safety that woods allow, while the quills of the dead one
seem to dig in deeper, as if clinging saves anyone.