Winter Endings
Our harvests yielded up even in winter.
My father would collect the eggs, only to find
at least one chicken whose insides had been
hollowed out. Or he would follow flutters
of feathers to the varmint’s hole near brook stones,
holding back the spring water and banks of
the earthen dam. My father would search out
and hammer tin over every gnawed
rat hole, would pound pig irons into the
chicken wire fence to contract the slivers
of space, then stand back, satisfied with
his handiwork. But neither nails nor spikes
in wood, wire, or earth would end the scars or
flesh of death. Unlike Adam before the fall,
my father knew the colors of death; like Joseph,
he had witnessed the birth of the immaculate
roundness, witnessed the plague of principalities,
released by Eve, tear through his son’s
arteries, and like the blue flames of
settling fires, anoint his head with ashes
before the articulate priest intoned.
No savior, but a lover of warm flesh,
my father sought to trap and rid the coop
of the devil. His soul framed and his spirit
nailed layer after layer of heavy,
small holed chicken wire over a door, then
attached a longer prison, a rectangle,
walled in, on three sides, its open door falling
solid lead when the glutton would trip the lever.
Winter Endings 2
Then my father scanned the hens for a lure,
rejected plump and spare hens, even runts.
His eyes approved the silky cock that thrust
its spurs toward the sky and howled when it could
not sink them into the mask defining
the sharp nose. The cock crowed while my father
lowered the coon’s prison into the earthen dam.
