pine hill road
1.
From the corner farm a trim black dog
begins to follow down the road and will
not leave, loping ahead, stopping to paw
along the ditch, the collar: “Faith”—“true
virgo energy”—when a neighbor comes
around the other way and shouting
if the dog is safe (“not ours!”)—hers is
the cabin where a bathtub statue
of st. Francis marks the fence between
the pastures of a ponderous and shaggy yak
(who frightens you) and the donkeys “Chuck
and Abel,” twins, thirty, and silvered, soft
noses on the metal gate and glassy eyes—
“everybody thinks a yak but no, in fact,
a highland Scottish bull”
—we three
together now
call the stranger’s dog back from her prodding
at the carcass of another neighbor’s cow—
gone renegade last winter, lost in the brush
near here, just out of view
and still bringing the wake of vultures down—
2.
The road is sectioned often by the quality of light
this afternoon—one of several rusted harrows rotting in the grass,
a stand of maples in a row posted with plastic notices
for “private property,” a vernal pool between the pines
we talk about the death of reading, the decay of thought,
you stop to draw a bulbous maple growing through a wall
outside the poet's onetime mansion remodeled gaudily
by some millionaires, a sketch that takes
two pages, with a view of Mt Monadnock past the patio
3.
“The leaves have come
a month sooner than usual”
—I wish I could be walking
always down the hill
with you,
like this, between
the silence of the stone—“it’s steep like this
in many places that I’ve been, Bolinas…
maybe one day we could go”—until
a golden net descends
onto the grass, “our favorite patch”
4.
A lone motorcyclist
too occupied to wave turns down
the road only a moment
before when we see the prints,
four claws, deep in the mud
—I clack
a banded stone I picked up earlier against a calcite chunk
as you prepare to toss an egg
from the dozen in your sweatshirt pocket
bought in town at feral farm
but nothing comes
beyond the shadow of a lilac tree,
a bank of trillium—