Wolves
There is a wood I wander
on the other side of sleep,
silently trailing a wolf
through snow. In stands
of birch and moon-shone oak,
she is thick with winter, wet
with milk, and she waits
when I’ve fallen behind.
But sometimes the eye
inside the wolf
is mine.
Sometimes the ice gives way
to day, the night to knolls
of wildflower. Between land
and sky, a band of thatch and
plaster blooming. Somewhere,
a bell is ringing, and one by one
the women come draw water
from a well. But I don’t hide,
for there the world is young.
They have not yet forgotten
my name.
Hog-Tight
Just like me, the osage tree, transplant from another river’s
valley. She roots to here from the Mississippi, by way
of a man named Meriwether. By way of Monticello.
Once favored by farmers for a living fence, now she lines
the roads, the fallow fields, a relic gone feral and gnarled.
Bull-strong, horse-high, hog-tight, they praised. A hedge
as never was hewn. With how many beasts have her eldest
contended? How deeply does the root remember? To me,
she recalls a hunger. A younger man wrapping all that I am
around a screaming hog. Knees planted, breathing slow, trying
to pin him between a buck and rail fence and a blade. Ah,
history. How wide do you cast your net? How, and where,
shall a man as I fare, in the scrutiny of centuries? Render
me down, deed by deed, and feed me piecemeal through the eye
of a needle. Even the dirty work got done. He was a fighter,
I remember saying, as his blood made mud with the dirt.
But Harry said, more like a boxer. Then he raised his fists
and swaggered a lap along the treeline.
-- Alexander Ross is an American poet, carpenter, and martial artist.