she crouches on the carpet
cowboy woody in hand, broken,
with an unending loop:
somebody’s poisoned the water hole!
somebody’s poisoned the water hole!
sunoco logistics, for one.
they scorched the earth
and burned the water,
left us stinking of gas-
somebody’s poisoned the water hole!
dusted with ash.
down the susquehanna,
55,000 gallons
and a settlement.
what will we grind to make the bread?
somebody’s poisoned the water hole!
and once we’ve
burned, boiled, dumped
it all away,
where will she live?
shred the contract-
but already,
the children are watching.
there’s a snake in my boot.
When it is Finished –
when you have burned
the final brown leaf
and watched the geese
fleeing clear, cold dusk,
when the rivers are frozen
with their dormant frogs
and pines the only life
poking through the grey,
when your stomach is half-filled
with hard squash and pickled corn,
when the hatchet snaps in half,
silent across frosty fields,
and the mornings are dark when
you clear paths for the children,
when the hard freeze
snaps the potato shoots,
when the dog is old and sick,
with a growth on her eye,
and cannot rush foxes
from the chicken coop,
when the last of the blackberry wine
has been drunk, when the milk cow
stops giving and the frost kills off
the cabbage in the cold frame -
how, then, will you remember
the long days, dandelions
and the harvest, a summer
bathed in strawberries?
Crown the Moose
A northwest wind judges some
headwall impasible, shoots up the veiny
valley of the ravine, and follows
the bloodline to a ridge
whose spine blushes with an alpenglow,
creaks under September ice. The
jawline is cut stone and skeletons,
skin pale and ash across the tundra.
She shouldn’t be here, this
far into the alpine zone, crunching
lily-white mats of diapensia and
twisted krumholtz underhoof.
Onward, while overhead the northwest
wind howls with voice like tempered
steel, she wanders, the unhurried steps
a fermentation of autumnal dormancy.
Charcoal eyes water, stinging,
blink languidly and seek out the
ravine, the warmer bloodline
to a thrumming, golden valley,
where Floridian visitors speed
along the Kancamagus, dart
beneath blood-red trees, snap
photographs six thousand feet below
the ridgeline, where she drifts, following
the northern tundra under wine-soaked skies,
dropping down the Ammonoosuc
where once, she was crowned.
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