Ring

Ring

The Vet Drives Past a Bull

up on its hind legshumping a cow in the early morning,frost on the newly seeded field.

In the back seat, her daughters writea collaborative sonnet.

She thinks how huge and stupidthis bull againstthe spring's wheat and silver.

It rhymes, one daughter says.It stinks, says the other.

Fenceposts

drown in the slough,red-winged blackbirds flying off.Whispers of the daughters,. . . when . . . home?

A Room

She warns her daughtersto be careful of ticksas they pick through dry grass.In the clearing a killdeer feigns injury,wails her alarm.

The daughters collect stippled snipe feathersa coyote left after the feast. They touchcow bones—pelvis, vertebrae tingedwith blood the colour of rose hip . . .

She remembers that round song . . .Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose,Will I ever see thee wed?

Bones left in a grove. Maples curved as the backsof women at work or the back of the vet pullingdistressed calves into the air.Curved to make a room,its ceiling a swarm of swallowtails.

And the spring so unseasonably warm.

Valley of Secrets: Museum

Here, long ago: beasts, magnolia, sycamorescreaming in the feral night. Her daughters on the other sideof the glass laugh without sound,their long hair wind-whippedover their mouths.

Out the window, white mud layersin chains,chains of dry hillsseal in 65 million years.

Pit Stop: Kipling

The morning afterher wedding she lockedherself in the bathroomfor hours.

Meadowlark invisible in grassspilling its amber riddles,its trills andtearson cow shit.

Visiting Grandmother

The old one, eighty-three, pours teaand serves chokecherry saucesqueezed years ago from fruitdown the lane. She sits and rocks, watchesher granddaughters laugh and leapthrough the sprinkler, watches

her daughter who just lefthusband, farm, brick house built to lastby his great grandfather, watchesthis woman not touching her cake,keeping herself like silverwarein a glossy, wooden case.

Rose

A round they used to singaround the campfire:

Rose, Rose, Rose, RoseWill I ever see thee wed?I will marry at thy will, Sire,At thy will . . .

How is a song round? asks her daughter.

One part begins again before the other's done, sighs the vet, it    never ends.

Twin calves suckle in a roadside slough.Rose, Rose, Rose past Lake Manitou.

Two Horses

in a field, headsinterlocked. Each one restson the other's neck and mane.They are not lovers. They can holdthis pose for hours.

Thunder in the distance, veins of a storm.

Nut Mountain

In the motel, after breakfast,she notices her hand lighter,bare of its wedding ring.

Finds it later, bright betweenthe sheets of her unmade bed.

Denn Alles Fleisch, es Ist wie Gras . . . *

sings the vet along with the tape,remembers the famous conductornow long dead, the calvesin her hands gasping for breath.

Laughter from the back, music,the scene always changingas long as she drives.

Poplar's new green, white trunks slimas teenage girls, riseand rise to the dirge.

Snow Geese

at dawn fly up,undulate in a silver ring.

This is what she pulledfrom her finger, flungto the sky in her dream.