THE FIELD

The battered field is hateful without remorse,

is as seductive as what is familiar: a wild horse

who long ceased being horse, had become beauty itself

failing as the field has failed or someone has failed

the field with overuse, the gray soil too sparse,

its blond grass in tight nubs and stiff as scimitars

that jut from the earth as declarations of war.

The barrenness cannot feed the hares who feed

the foxes who feed the bloodlust of men.

There is a leafless dogwood stunted

in its naked reach. A storm rolls over

the jagged boughs raking the black air’s

softened belly until lightning clarifies its scars.

Scimitars could scar a belly with their sharpness,

with their curves like a gleaming succubus

sliding on each nerve’s nylon until the harp is

undone. Or the harp is played to the tune

wind makes undressing an arid field. This is love

if someone says so. A man weeps

to soft music in his house though nothing

can hear him outside his window, his cry

a ripple in a pond after a frog leaps out

then leaps back in, a word spoken

by mistake that the speaker wants to take back.

The word could be like love too if broken,

more broken than the shrill gate outside

swinging open then shut, obliterating entrance

and exit. Here waits the god whose flute reveals and hides

the way. She is mischievous with her song

coming off the rusted hinges. The gate is edged

by two stone pillars, both topped with pots

once holding lavender, now holding moldy soil,

one sweet smell deposed by another. Rot

and the bones left bare is the story of the hare and fox

while the felled horse crafts the field’s ugliness.

Its wraith hooves crush the ground. Let the gate

squeal shut against that bestiary. The world’s

revision of itself roils through the sky. Storm

of bruised clouds, lightning and the last living beast

revealed in bursts: first its outline. Next its distant

maw made clear in that moment of light. Then two

cobalt eyes, an abacus by which to count the days.

Hunter

HUNTER

When you were mine though not

mine at all permanently, just a body

for loneliness, a loneliness interrupted,

interruptive—

the sky opened like a secret in a mouth

mouth with a word in it

word with an arrowhead in its flank: Love, small

creature it was

crying in the night beneath me

Final Poem for the Deer