(from Connecting the Dots, W.W. Norton, 1996)

I was the last of my line,
farm-raised, chesty, and bold.
Not one of your flawless show-world
forty-five pound Dalmations.
I ran with the horses, my darlings.

I loped at their heels, mile
for mile, swam rivers they forded
wet to the belly. I guarded
them grazing, haloed in flies.
Their smell became my smell.

Joyous I ate their manure.
Its undigested oats
still sweet, kept me fit.
I slept curled at the flank
of the fiercest broodmare.

We lay, a study in snores
ear flicks and farts in her stall
until she came to the brink,
the birth hour of her foal.
Then, she shunned me cruelly.

Spring and fall I erred over
and over. Skunks were my folly.
Then, I was nobody’s lover.
I rolled in dung and sand.
When my heart burst in the pond,

my body sank and then rose
like a birch log, a blaze
of white against spring green.
Now I lie under the grasses
they crop, my own swift horses

who start up and spook in the rain
without me, the warm summer rain.

(from Where I Live – New & Selected Poems 1990-2010, W.W. Norton, 2010)

Some days the pond
wears a glaze of yellow pollen.

Some days it is clean-swept.
The trout leap up, feasting on insects.

A modest size, it sits
like a soup tureen in a surround of white

pine where Rosie, 14 lbs., some sort
of rescued terrier, part bat

(the ears), part anteater (the nose),
shyly paddles in the shallows

for salamanders, frogs
and little painted turtles. She logged

ten years down south in a kennel, secured
in a crate at night. Her heart murmur

will carry her off, no one can say when.
Meanwhile she is rapt in

the moment, our hearts leap up observing.
Dogs live in the moment, pursuing

that brilliant dragonfly called pleasure.
Only we, sunstruck in this azure

day, must drag along the backpacks
of our past, must peer into the bottom muck

of what’s to come, scanning the plot
for words that say another year, or not.

(from Jack and Other New Poems,, W.W. Norton, 2005)

How pleasant the yellow butter
melting on white kernels, the meniscus
of red wine that coats the inside of our goblets

where we sit with sturdy friends as old as we are
after shucking the garden’s last Silver Queen
and setting husks and stalks aside for the horses

the last two of our lives, still noble to look upon:
our first foal, now a bossy mare of 28
which calibrates to 84 in people years

and my chestnut gelding, not exactly a youngster
at 22. Every year, the end of summer
lazy and golden, invites grief and regret:

suddenly it’s 1980, winter batters us,
winds strike the cruelty out of Dickens. Somehow
we have seven horses for six stalls. One of them,

a big-nosed road gelding, calm as a president’s portrait
lives in the rectangle that leads to the stalls. We call it
the motel lobby. Wise old campaigner, he dunks his

hay in the water bucket to soften it, then visits the others
who hang their heads over their Dutch doors. Sometimes
he sprawls out flat in his commodious quarters.

That spring, in the bustle of grooming
and riding and shoeing, I remember I let him go
to a neighbor I thought was a friend, and the following

fall she sold him down the river. I meant to
but never did go looking for him, to buy him back
and now my old guilt is flooding this twilit table

my guilt is ghosting the candles that pale us to skeletons
the ones we must all become in an as yet unspecified order.
Oh Jack, tethered in what rough stall alone

did you remember that one good winter?

(from Still to Mow, W.W. Norton, 2007)

He came, a dog auspiciously named Virgil,
homeless, of unknown breed but clearly hound
barking at scents, aroused by hot ones to bugle.
His first week here he brought three squirrels to ground
and lined their mangled corpses up on the grass
to be—why not?—admired before burial.
He gobbled the snottiest tissues from the trash.
Also, he swiped our lunches off the table.
He knew not sit or stay, has still to take in
that chasing sheep and horses is forbidden.
When reprimanded, he grovels, penitent.
He longs for love with all his poet’s soul.
      His eyebrows make him look intelligent.
      We save our choicest food scraps for his bowl.

(from Still to Mow, W.W. Norton, 2007)

Is it my fault I’m part rat terrier, part
the kind of dog who lives in a lady’s lap?
I didn’t ask to be bottom mutt in the pack
that runs untamed through the twisted trash-strewn streets
in Xochiapulcho, I didn’t ask to be plucked
up by a pair of gringos. First, they took
away my manhood. No more sweet reek
of bitches, no hot pursuits, no garbage rot.
When they packed up to go back to the USA
I thought they’d cry, then dump me out, but no.
Macho mestizo, my entry papers say.
Who dines in style and sleeps the sleep of kings
ought dream no more of his rowdy half-starved days. . .
I dwell in heaven but without the wings.

(from Where I Live – New & Selected Poems 1990-2010, W.W. Norton, 2010)

Praise Be
as in Praise be, it’s a filly

and Hallelujah
as in Hallelujah, it’s another filly

are middle-aged mares now.
Their dam Boomer is ancient.

She is the daughter of Taboo,
former slave in

a drug scam running
cocaine from Miami

to Boston under
the trailer’s floorboards.

When the state
sold her to the slaughterer

we bought her back
for 30 cents a pound and

bred her to a little
Arabian stud with a clubfoot.

33 years later,
Boomer has a metabolic

end-of-life disease.
We’ll give her one

last summer on grass,
the vet said cheerfully,

stroking her mane.
Pick out a good place

to dig the hole.
Mid-August.

Boomer is sleek,
Gleams like a waxed

Mercedes. Canters
uphill to pasture,

trots down.
I try to imagine

the sweet tasseled fields
without her,

the blind glass of midnight
without her

peremptory whinies
to summon the others

when lightning
shatters it,

the way
the little herd will

close around her absence,
the way they’ll go

on grazing, mouths slobber-
full of the last clover.

(from Where I Live – New & Selected Poems 1990-2010, W.W. Norton, 2010)

After the year of come-and-go nosebleeds, after
daily washing mucousy blood from his forelegs and flanks
where he swiped himself clean in his impatient horsey way,
I saw the tumor sprout waxy and white
out of one nostril and dangle there, a rare fruit.
Truth rose in my mouth, a drench of gall and wormwood
and I sent for the vet and the backhoe driver
who came together like football coaches conferring.

The vet patted and praised him as she entered the stall
he was born in twenty-six years ago and staggered to his feet
with only a few false lunges in the predawn black and suckled
in small audible gulps from his warm mother. After
she got a line into his neck vein—he jittered a little the way
he’d always pulled back from the needle—
she started the sleep med and I stood with him feeding
him apple slices slowly making them last and when

his head drooped I led him out into the paddock and she shot
the syringe full of pentobard into his vein. He dropped
with a thud, a slain king, and by then the backhoe had torn
the earth open, the driver deep in the hole raising
icebox-size boulders and deftly arranging them in a row,
scooping red dirt as the late afternoon sun winked out
behind the treeline and after he finished the grave he went
downhill to fit the forks on the front of his machine and by then

I could hardly see as he hoisted the great swaying body aloft
and bore it across the road to the hole and in the cold dark I poured
a libation of apple juice for the earth to welcome his corpse—
some drops spilled on his chestnut flank and some dribbled
on his cheek and splashed onto his yellow teeth as he lay
deep on one side and my hand shook—I could hardly see—
rocking my grief back and forth over this kind death
the taste of apple wasting in his mouth.