Flight: New and Selected Poems Read Free Page A

wind, motion.
Not even a sleeve of sackcloth slipped over the hoof.
To quiet the hunt. To make from its little union
not a predator, but a silence.
Just the half-light of forests, black leaves
on their withered stems,
then the graceful, intricate weave closing over
the mossy sole—as a hand might be closed
by a descending hand,
pale, almost weightless, and everywhere.

The Klipsan Stallions
    Just one crack against the sandbar
and the grain freighter crumbled into
itself like paper in flames, all the lifeboats
and blankets, the tons of yeasty wheat
sucked down so fast the tumbling sailors
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    still carried in the flat backs of their brains
the sensations of the galley, smoky with mutton fat,
someone’s hiccup, someone’s red woolen sleeve
still dragging itself across their eyes
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    even as the long sleeve of the water closed over them.
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    It was 3 a.m., the third of November, 1891.
Just to the south of this chaos, where the Columbia
washes over the Pacific,
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    there was shouting, the groan of stable doors,
and over the beachfront, a dozen
horses were running. Trained
with a bucket of timothy to swim rescue,
they passed under the beam of the Klipsan lighthouse,
passed out from the grasses, alfalfa,
deep snores and the shuffle of hooves,
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    and entered the black ocean.
Just heads then, stretched nostrils and necks
swimming out to the sailors
who were themselves just heads, each brain
a sputtering flame above the water.
Delirious, bodies numb, they answered
    the stallions with panic—
So this is the death parade, Neptune’s
horses lashed up from Akasha!
And still,
through some last act of the self, when
the tails floated past they grabbed on,
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    then watched as the horses
returned to themselves, as the haunches
pulled, left then right, and the small circles
of underhooves stroked up in unison. Here
was the sound of sharp breathing, troubled
with sea spray, like bellows left out in the rain,
and here the texture of sand on the belly,
on the shirt and thigh, on the foot
with its boot, and the naked foot—and then, finally,
the voices, the dozens gathered to
cheer the rescue, the long bones of the will,
causing hands to close over those rippling tails,
yellow teeth to close over the timothy.

Mid-Plains Tornado
    I’ve seen it drive straw straight through a fence post—
sure as a needle in your arm—the straws all erect
and rooted in the wood like quills.
Think of teeth being drilled, that enamel and blood
burning circles inside your cheek. That’s like the fury.
Only now it’s quail and axles, the northeast bank
of the Cedar River, every third cottonwood.
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    It’s with you all morning. Something wet in the air.
Sounds coming in at a slant, like stones
clapped under water. And pigs, slow to the trough.
One may rub against your leg, you turn with a kick
and there it is, lurching down from a storm cloud:
the shaft pulses toward you across the fields
like a magician’s finger.
You say goodbye to it all then, in a flash over
your shoulder, with the weathervane so still
it seems painted on the sky.
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    The last time, I walked a fresh path toward the river.
Near the edge of a field I found our mare, pierced
through the side by the head of her six-week foal.
Her ribs, her great folds of shining skin,
closed over the skull. I watched them forever, it seemed:
eight legs, two necks, one astonished head curved
back in a little rut of hail. And across the river
slim as a road, a handful of thrushes set down
in an oak tree, like a flurry of leaves
drawn back again.

Strike
    First the salt was removed,
then the axes and powderhorns,
the blankets, jerky, shot-pouches, gourds,
the kettles and muslin, the burlap torsos of
cornmeal, and the wagons hauled on the coil of rope,
hand over hand, up
the last granite face of the High Sierra,
dangling, wobbling fat in that wind like lake bass,
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    then the oxen, pushed up the spidery trail—
in the concave crooks of their