Uschi

Do you remember how we went for a walk every evening
that September, from the cabin at the edge of the mountains;
and how that one night we happened on all those buffalo
just before dark, corralled by a sturdy electric fence,
huddling in the ravine furthest away from us? And
the discussion we had when we saw the culvert
passing under the barrier’s clicks of alternating current,
weighing out the pros and cons of using it as a crawlspace
until we found ourselves inching through to the other side,
over the dried mud and twigs, hands running along the
dark corrugations of metal? And how we stole through
the pasture, heads low, sure that, with nowhere to run,
they’d trample us if they spooked, finally slinking on our
bellies to peek over a rise, only to find them so close
we could smell their woolly curls, enormous humps of
live weight compacting the clay, dusty nostrils sighing.
Do you remember how everything at that moment,
how every being that was framed inside the enclosure
slowed into a careful stillness; how every eye paused
to ruminate on the falling dusk and its shadowless forms,
the grass holding the damp of its breath, while the sky
lifted evenly, growing thinner, dissolving into the first stars?
Do you? And do you remember Uschi, how the air
all around us, in every direction, was humming?

The Old Woman Living Opposite

Sometimes in the shed aspen shoots
tendril through the floorboards,
suckered from rhizomes and
stretching their spines up
to the cool glass.

While behind them spiders
gather the corners and
old grease stills the air;
which only stirs when someone
slips in for a garden tool,
or once a year
for the Christmas lights,
the closing door rifting waves
through the dusted fabric
of cobwebs.

A stem with a single leaf
towering pale over grey joints
wrinkled as bony knees, having
reared its head in what it senses
is the wrong place
yet the only place
it knows.

Where the sole thing left to do is
perch the point of its chin on the sill
and draw whatever it can from the day;
even snatching the paltry sustenance
from each shifting glint
in the night.

There is a Bench

in front of a lake I know, at just the spot a
bench should be. The view from it is one
of my renditions of perfect; while the bench
is not. The planks are weathered and grey, given
to stinging fingers with a sliver if they drag over
the wood to brush away fallen leaves or pips.
One of the sides has succumbed to frost heave,
and over long periods of time, you can notice
the slow pull of your body down the skew.
This shoddy foundation once got me thinking
about the municipal workers that installed it,
digging and cement mixing, shovels expertly
funnelling the mix of gravel and sand into the hole
which someone hadn’t dug quite deep enough.
When they returned to bolt the planks into place
I can easily imagine one of them, not saying it but
noting in his mind, how this bench was situated
at just the spot that a bench should be; maybe
even imagining that he’d come back sometime
for one of those picnics he was always promising
and never quite getting around to going on.
Of course, I don’t know if he ever did. What I
do know is that tonight the snow is falling heavily
outside, crystalline parachutes settling gently onto
everything under the churning clouds. The storm is
silent, patiently accumulating, mushrooming surfaces,
cloaking the definition of objects. Like the bench I know,
looking out onto a lake, abandoned and in the dark
for now, while another furrowed layer is slowly
added onto one of my renditions of perfect.