Three Poems from Three Different Books

Yoked Together

The warden, cop, and vet all told me on the phone the coon must be destroyed,
provided, like them, I possessed the means to do it, as for better or worse I did.

He’d come up out of our woods and onto the porch and simply would not scare.
He had stuff running out of his eyes and skinny, tatterdemalion hair

and he probably had, therefore, rabies. Or maybe distemper. In any event,
surely something was wrong, and according to the doctor, my good friend,

something abnormal enough it likely posed a not inconsiderable health threat 
to our family, our dogs, our property, and to other families and to other pets

and also to what he called “the wildlife community.” By the time I got done
searching for keys for the gun cabinet, he stood out there in the autumn garden,

where now and then he pawed at the wilted greens of a buried carrot, pausing
now and then as well to lift one foot, and next the other, and looking

more than anything bewildered. He reminded me of poor gone Arthur,
brain-damaged young: he and I used to split up wood together,
															    
and he’d sort of do the same thing with his legs, and his eyes were also ringed
with black. (He smoked a filthy corncob pipe, through which everything

must pass: milkweed, leaves of grass, cigars, cigarettes, chew—you name it.)
I suppose I thought of him because he too was above all else bewildered.

He’d squint and scratch his head, as if he never completely understood
—no more, really, come to think of it after all these years, than I could—

why I’d show up at his shack every late August with the saw rig and the maul
to help him fill his woodshed, which was no more than an empty pony stall.

I imagined using, precisely, a maul on this poor, disheveled, sickly beast
because I didn’t want my small daughters to hear me fire the shotgun blast

that would do him in. Yet I admit I was also afraid to get too close,
and I likewise must have supposed a bludgeoning would make an awful mess,

and somehow it might have felt too much as though I’d brought a heavy blade 
down on baffled Arthur, the coon’s human image, as I’ve already said.

The shotgun having been fired, the creature fell and huffed once. Then: silence.
And I, no more than a dreary man of letters, as if my knee had jerked,            

thought of myself at one end and Arthur at the other of a cropped white birch
and of a famous poet’s phrase about things being “yoked together by violence.”


             A Monk After Dark

One boot sags like him in his cubicle’s corner.
He drops the other to the floor with a grimace.
He’s still devout. If his face contorts, 
It’s from pain in both his shoulders. A nuisance,

Not metaphor. It’s the fruit of labor–
A day-long springtime dig in the garden:
Parsnips enough for the brothers, heaped pale
In the wheelbarrow, damnably old-fashioned.

He shouldn’t complain, but concedes he’s bored. 
In a club a jazz man’s trombone rumbles, 
A point guard throws a tricky pass 
In a game, flesh flickers onscreen.  For example.

Owls outside. Does he envy night-birds?   
How might they profit him? He’s no psalmist. 
He took his vows far later than most. 
There were too many gawkers today on visits:

As they dawdled, he thought of a schoolmate’s smile, 
Her “peasant” skirt, the glint of her teeth.
He kissed her once as they walked across
A late-autumn field of winter wheat. 

For instance. Their words? He can’t remember.
Where might that decent girl be now?
He dreams of her as a visitor here:
In unsuitable shoes, she’d wend through rows

Of beets and splendid heads of cabbage.
She’d study the bees with a less studied eye,
The way they bob in morning’s first sun,
Their perfect bodies reflecting its light. 

How strange, their tiny white larvae in May.
But to him, all this is completely familiar, 
And familiar feels sometimes like an affront.
Tonight, as they do each night, owls yammer,

Over and over and over and over.


Commonplace Elegy

The operation to repair the botched 
	procedure on my fingers 
was a botch– which means I fumble, 
	say, when I tie my boots.

And so? No threat to my survival. 
	Frost-bitten Black-Eyed Susans 
nod in the wind outside. Of course
	they’re dead, but as for me,
 
I’m here, not ill, and not in disgrace
	with fortune and men’s eyes, 
and scarcely alone, so I can’t keen
	about some outcast state.
 
Besides those withered flowers, I’ve seen 
	no shortage of omens. Omens?
Yearly commonplaces, rather: 
	some squalling starlings hop
 
around beneath the backyard feeder, 
	although they’ll find no seed 
until we’re sure the bears are denned; 
	flickers squeal in the woods; 
	
and so on. Winter will descend, 
	but who could feign surprise?
I can tritely find it all sobering, 
	and do. Here at the end

of our little road the gate is moldering. 
	We couldn’t keep anything out 
if we tried. Its rusted latch is colored
	like leaves on last month’s sumacs. 

Rock-hard ground, ice in the puddles–
	mere weeks away. And why 
should I find that humbling? I’ve roamed this planet 
	for decades, but I keep hoping 

for some reward, as if I hadn’t 
	received quite a few. Up high, 
a jet plane’s contrail spans our sky.
	Who knows where it may be going?