Fetching Cows

 Sir John Alfred Arnesby Brown, "Full Summer, Ludham, Norfolk"

Fetching Cows

The black one, last as usual swings her head

And coils a black tongue round a grass-tuft. I

Watch her soft weight come down, her split feet spread.

In front, the others swing and slouch; they roll

Their great Greek eyes and breathe out milky gusts

From muzzles black and shiny as wet coal.

The collie trots, bored, at my heels, then plops

Into the ditch. The sea makes a tired sound

That's always stopping though it never stops.

A haycart squats prickeared agains the sky.

Hay breath and milk breath. Far out in the West

The wrecked sun founders though its colours fly.

The collie's bored. There's nothing to control . . .

The black cow is two native carriers

Bringing its belly home, slung from a pole.

Norman McCaig

 

Some poems take you away for a moment, whisk you off to a different time or place. It’s like a holiday for the mind, a chance to escape your surroundings and be, well, anywhere else. That’s the magic of this poem.

 

Beholding the Hare

Yvonne Carroll

Beholding the Hare

In the gale that's trying to take the roof off this small house,
shaking it to it's rocky foundations, the hare is making
his rounds of the garden. Wet morning light shows me his ears
hemmed in white, their black points, how they flatten
when the wind roars, rise and swivel when he hunkers under
the shelter of hedges or against the drenched stones of the wall.

All he knows is the way the weather is, how it wraps him up
in its fits and starts, a sort of swirling whirligod whose breath
he must, turn and turn about, huddle from or bask in. Now
he stretches to get at a dark green left-over bramble leaf, all else
bare as sea-beaten stone and showing to the wind and rain
its skin and bone -- tree-bark bright as those black-currant eyes

that read the world like a book, each page changing the story
no matter what we or the hare or that one ruffled chaffinch
balancing between red and yellow pegs on the clothesline
can make of it. Right now what I'm struck by is the creature's 
articulate singularity, the way he is all of a piece, every particle
precisely in the present moment, from the inked tip of each ear

to the chalk-tuft under his raised tail, from the fur-coated ripple
that is his muscle when he tenses a haunch, to the delicate tremor
his nose makes as it fetches the rest of the world into the realm
of his understanding, that many-scented evanescence in the wind
of things, what his eye can't find, nor his tongue touch, nor the
soft fingers of his fur make any sense of, nor his quick ears

swivelling to every whisper -- but which the snub shiverbutton
of his nose (colour of tree-bark) finds, filling out his feeling
for the world, any minute of which would take me an age of
translation to carry over even a glimmer, knowing no words
for his wholeness, for all the stuff of sense registering at once
on the shell of him, how he's the kernel of its kinetic wheeling

by just being there, free of memory and forecast, being at one
with possibility like that, and not at odds, not split in the middle
and out of focus, not feeling the very ground itself veined
with turbulence, fault lines branching every which way from
the lost centre, the heart itself out of tune, unable to contain it-
self. Not, that is, one of us: soul-searching in our skin of reason.

Eamon Grennan

(The wind really is trying to take the roof off the house, as it happens.) After Dylan Thomas's sweeping love and death lyric, we need a change, something individual and specific. Pablo Neruda and his Odes have given me a taste for the Spotlight Poem, the poem with one focus. It amazes me how honing in inevitably leads outward. This poem does that in a sort of regretful way, the speaker seeming to envy the "wholeness" of the hare in comparison to our human condition of split-awareness and inner imbalance. And his description of the hare - "all of a piece, every particle precisely in the present moment" - doesn't that line capture exactly how a small animal freezes in mid-action when it senses danger? And - "the snub shiverbutton of his nose" - the perfect words to bring the hare wholly alive before our eyes. 




 

Five A.M. In the Pinewoods

David Grossmann, "Among the Fallen Leaves"

Five A.M. in the Pinewoods

I’d seen

their hoofprints in the deep

needles and knew

they ended the long night

under the pines, walking

like two mute

and beautiful women toward

the deeper woods, so I

got up in the dark and

went there. They came

slowly down the hill

and looked at me sitting under

the blue trees, shyly

they stepped

closer and stared

from under their thick lashes and even

nibbled some damp

tassels of weeds. This

is not a poem about a dream,

though it could be.

This is a poem about the world

that is ours, or could be.

Finally

one of them—I swear it!—

would have come to my arms.

But the other

stamped sharp hoof in the

pine needles like

the tap of sanity,

and they went off together through

the trees. When I woke

I was alone,

I was thinking:

so this is how you swim inward,

so this is how you flow outward,

so this is how you pray.

Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver uses such a light touch in her nature poems.*The way she describes here how she watches the deer, waits for them, still and silent as they come toward her, seems to me to be a description also of how she writes a poem. She doesn't push her ideas forward, she waits for the thoughts and ideas to come of their own volition. You might wonder, is that unusual? Probably not. But each poet has their own way of working (sometimes each poem has its own way too, I suppose), and it matters. Some know exactly what they want to say, and go about getting it down. Some make lists, and describe, as if getting the thing or idea or place down piece by piece. And some let the words come, not knowing what they will say. It makes a difference, how a poem happens. That last stanza  - I keep reading it over and over. I wonder if she's saying Oh, so this poem is a prayer. As if, at the end of writing these lines she now sees what the poem meant itself to be.

  
*see also "Snowy Night" posted Feb.4, 2017