North, by ALISON HAWTHORNE DEMING
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Morning. The dark horses
absorb sunlight, sheep
graze fast as fall shrinks
the feast, time unhomogenized
by doing twice-daily chores--
feeding salt in the heat,
molasses in the cold--not missing
the moment when you go into
the barn in a snowstorm,
the sky does a quick grey-to-blue
and you come out to maple trees,
weed stalks, even the barbed-wire fence
wearing a thin skin of ice.
Seen at just the right angle,
the sunlight fires that skin to gold,
just for a moment, before clouds
crowd in and even with the stove
stoked full you’ll be cold for hours
but not really mind. The old neighbor
saws all winter by hand--
body stiff as wood, bending slow
to the sawhorse, baling twine
hanging from porch rafters in loops
the size of muskrat legs.
Summers--he milks his cow
right in the pasture
and she doesn’t walk away.
From “Science and Other Poems” by Alison Hawthorne Deming. (Louisiana State University Press: $17.95; 80 pp.) 1994 Reprinted by permission.
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