Once in August
for Doug Peacock
Chickadees calling out
their libidinal tune
hey babee hey babee chickadeedeedee
in the scorched red surrender
of the day
Gusts of pollen soft yellow smoke-sweet
swirls of insects wing storm drone song
the heads of the grasses bowed beneath
a palpable weight of merciless heat
tide-shimmer over timothy bunch grass
sainfoin bees in unbroken waves
of blossom
And the bear stood
her mouth dripping chokecherry
and I hadn't seen her
and I was too close
and her cub was too near
and I was lost
in a death-indifferent sea
of joy
Pickin' Out
Owner'd bought a buncha mustangs to keep 'em from goin'
to Canada fer dog food, strange colored and beautiful and
crazy wild, and he'd called Swede to sort 'em, to figure
which ones'd make cuttin' stock, or be good for packin'
and trailin', or only just worth lettin' loose acrost his
twenty-five thousand acres to run and stay untrammeled
and maybe breed some good'uns down the road.
We'd corraled 'em, and Darl and I was sittin' on the fence
and watchin' Swede work, though work was probly a misnomer.
Swede had a gorgeous Morgan-Quarter Horse cross, and
he ran her with his knees, and by shiftin' his weight so subtle
you hadta know him and the horse both to catch it, and he was
just ridin' her in amongst the wild bunch, makin' sweet noises
under his breath, and in half an hour he'd been next to
every one of 'em, and then he started cuttin' 'em out,
the ones he wanted, headin' 'em over to the side and
through the wide alley he'd built to the east, and Clay
was openin' and closin' it to let 'em in and keep 'em,
it was like a dance.
Darl said to me a man like Swede had a kind of poetry
in his blood, just beyond reach and one step past memory,
like he was born knowin' all the beats and rhythms,
where the line breaks, or not, the rhymes, the tune
of the language, until you have it, have the music,
and then you never need the words again,
you don't need words for anythin' at all.
And he was right. Swede was master of the nod,
the raised eyebrow, the wink, pointed with his chin
or his lips like the Navajo and Lakota, leaned one way
or another in the saddle, widened his eyes or squinted,
hummed music under his breath that was so eloquent
of both the current situation and the state of our souls
that Darl said God could learn a thing or two if He was
payin' attention. Not that Darl believed in God.
But we all damn sure believed in Swede.
Night Fishing There’s a floating borderland between light going down to darkness and the humming rise of insects into the drift currents of cool wind over water, over this lake which holds the world mirrored perfectly: dry hills, sage, drowned cottonwoods, the buoyant angler whipping the wild horses of the air with a supple rod— with the merest flick of the wrist fly poised on the surface before sinking in a soft spiral bottomward, where hunger follows, where the eye cannot. The strike, when it comes, is quick hard down, an elephantine pull, an ache— a sudden nothing. Whatever it was that leapt out of the dark water wearing fish flesh and haloed in the moon, that swallowed the mayfly’s dance then hung by threads of starlight weightless in the still air, and fell, a streak of silver comet-sure back into rippling heaven, cannot be betrayed by naming, though it named me: Cast-Away, Night-Fisher, Ghost-in-the-Shallows— I am trying to learn to walk like water.
Three Horses Grazing Detail, Chinese Silk Screen, Yuan Dynasty, Thirteenth Century, by an Anonymous Painter
Seven hundred years of grass, pale yellow, straw yellow—
it must be autumn—stretch so far into the sky that the horizon is mute. There is no edge to the field, no last fence or stone post, no natural barrier cast up of hills or far mountains, no cloudy heaven mimicking landscape, only clouds of pollen veiling the horses like a mist. One is eating, the roan; and next to him, a black mare with white blazing her face like last light illuminating sheer cliffs has her head askew on her neck and her ears laid back—is the contest for one choice tuft worth nips and tussle when she has abundance at her own feet and the day is fading? Perhaps. The eyes of both horses are lanterns in fog, gold and golden. Butt into the wind and his tail whipping out a single brushstroke against the papery air, a third horse faces the invisible border of meadow and waits for the girl child to bring him hard yellow pears, first bloom of chrysanthemum from her window box, sugar! He knows she is coming and he is patient in his hunger. The bickering of his companions, the diminished light, cool wind growing sharper into evening, nothing can touch the absolute sure joy of his anticipation. His bones are dust, that man who painted this buckskin horse, this shadow on translucent silk whose skin still quivers with desire for the touch of a small white hand on his neck, bursts of sweetness on his tongue.
B.J. Buckley is a Montana poet who has worked in Arts-in-Schools & Communities programs for more than four decades. Her chapbook, In January, the Geese, won the Comstock Review's 35th Anniversary Poetry Chapbook Prize. She has recent work in the Inflectionist Review, Pine Row, and Oakwood.