Pentimento, and: Evidence, and: Patient Griselda

Pentimento

They did not die when wounded,

but took a wound and survived with a scar.

—Robert Bly, Iron John

When the bullcomes out of the cage,he does not ask permissionof the keeper with his limpdrover's whip.

For a young man numbedby rules, the admonitionsof an impotent father,this is a sign.

He seesthat the bull is his mentor.

If the bull explodes,hooves and pizzleand hammering balls,

and shatters the gate,

the apprentice will also leap,vaulting the barrier chute,torn flesh of his ribsthe price of escape.

Maybe,even as he falls in a cloudof pollen, his descentembraced by a crowd of fireweed,he will begin to rise.

Blood and abrasions no badgeof humility, yet marks of a lessononly the bull could teach him.

Evidence

This bloodless landscape.Fences draped in erminelike a czar's cape.

Now we have mentioned ermine,here is a drop of blood.

Here is a blue featherand some others in a circle, clearm.o. of an ornicide.

What are the limitsof winter's carnage?

Every morning fresh tracksof a neighbor's dogpenetrate the lane, then the necklaceof footprints turns on itself

where the tall snag was turnedinto a wind flute by a woodpecker,where a small flat stone keeps a bouldersuspended as if by superior will,where the ditch falls dangerously away,

the dog has retreated toward home again.There is a limit to his courage.Who knows if he turns awaybecause I marked a tree there, pausingin my work clearing the ditch.Or if he sniffs a fisher cat's reek.

I think his black heart pounds,hearing owls chuckle,picking blue jay bones from their teeth,hearing the great cliff breathelike a moaning machine.

Patient Griselda

for Heather

Do something todayfor the old gray goose.

She sits by the hourby the castoff topperof the pickup truck.Its darkened windowmirrors her apron, her face.

Or, like a mad auntaddled by loneliness,she fusses loudly at herequally fussy companionin the rainwater puddleout by the shed.

She's wearing weedsthese months of sun and thaw.A widow, as the old geese say,before she was wed.

One by one her kinwent down the gray-blind,winter corridorbetween the walls of snow,past the mailbox on its postand out into the light-blasted road.