SOLACE IN FAR PLACES
When people are dead and peaceless
they hate life, they only like carrion.
- D. H. Lawrence, (“Dead People”)
The new calf, drawn with the others to me
from where he sucked and his mother laid him down,
bawls from the maze of razor sharp gooseberries
like concertina wire sprung in neat circles.
As the sun inches below us, his fresh black coat glints
with each urgent breath to the dozen cows and calves
at peace around me – my trusting congregation
waiting for a sign that I may deliver something.
Poor dumb souls with eyes so deep and sentient,
they read my movements, my pride, my love –
for I come with nothing else but a gun today. Up
in the rocks his mother stands and answers sternly.
I have been hunting quail – first time in twenty years –
and not quick enough to hurt the coveys much.
Afoot, I am even with uneven ground – feel the details
missed a horseback – share their eyes and wear
the landscape like a home. Between rockpiles, a severed
femur freshly stripped to the hoof. Deep in the hollow
of a live oak, white cage of bone disrobed – I know
the cow whose fevered eyes hid her here – remember
last week’s bear tracks in the road dust,
the coyote slipping manzanita into thin air.
In this far place, there is no room for guilt
or blame, to hate the way some people do.