poetry

What Did I Love, by Ellen Bass What did I love about killing the chickens? Let me start with the drive to the farm as darkness was sinking back into the earth. The road damp and shining like the snail’s silver ribbon and the orchard with its bony branches. I loved the yellow rubber aprons and the way Janet knotted my broken strap. And the stainless-steel altars we bleached, Brian sharpening the knives, testing the edge on his thumbnail. All eighty-eight Cornish hens huddled in their crates. Wrapping my palms around their white wings, lowering them into the tapered urn. Some seemed unwitting as the world narrowed; some cackled and fluttered; some struggled. I gathered each one, tucked her bright feet, drew her head through the kill cone’s sharp collar, her keratin beak and the rumpled red vascular comb that once kept her cool as she pecked in her mansion of grass. I didn’t look into those stone eyes. I didn’t ask forgiveness. I slid the blade between the feathers and made quick crescent cuts, severing the arteries just under the jaw. Blood like liquor pouring out of the bottle. When I see the nub of heart later, it’s hard to believe such a small star could flare like that. I lifted each body, bathing it in heated water until the scaly membrane of the shanks sloughed off under my thumb. And after they were tossed in the large plucking drum I loved the newly naked birds. Sundering the heads and feet neatly at the joints, a poor man’s riches for golden stock. Slitting a fissure reaching into the chamber, freeing the organs, the spill of intestines, blue-tinged gizzard, the small purses of lungs, the royal hearts, easing the floppy liver, carefully, from the green gall bladder, its bitter bile. And the fascia unfurling like a transparent fan. When I tug the esophagus down through the neck, I love the suck and release as it lets go. Then slicing off the anus with its gray pearl

of shit. Over and over, my hands explore each cave, learning to see with my fingertips. Like a traveller in a foreign country, entering church after church. In every one the same figures of the Madonna, Christ on the Cross, which I’d always thought was gore until Marie said to her it was tender, the most tender image, every saint and political prisoner, every jailed poet and burning monk. But though I have all the time in the world to think thoughts like this, I don’t. I’m empty as I rinse each carcass, and this is what I love most. It’s like when the refrigerator turns off and you hear the silence. As the sun rose higher we shed our sweatshirts and moved the coolers into the shade, but, other than that, no time passed. I didn’t get hungry. I didn’t want to stop. I was breathing from some bright reserve. We twisted each pullet into plastic, iced and loaded them in the cars. I loved the truth. Even in just this one thing: looking straight at the terrible, one-sided accord we make with the living of this world. At the end, we scoured the tables, hosed the dried blood, the stain blossoming through the water.

Stanley Kunitz, by Mary Oliver

I used to imagine him coming from his house, like Merlin strolling with important gestures through the garden where everything grows so thickly, where birds sing, little snakes lie on the boughs, thinking of nothing but their own good lives, where petals float upward, their colors exploding, and trees open their moist pages of thunder - it has happened every summer for years. But now I know more about the great wheel of growth, and decay, and rebirth, and know my vision for a falsehood. Now I see him coming from the house - I see him on his knees, cutting away the diseased, the superfluous, coaxing the new, know that the hour of fulfillment is buried in years of patience - yet willing to labor like that on the mortal wheel. Oh, what good it does the heart to know it isn’t magic! Like the human child I am I rush to imitate - I watch him as he bends among the leaves and vines to hook some weed or other; I think of him there raking and trimming, stirring up those sheets of fire between the smothering weights of earth, the wild and shapeless air.

The Shark, by Mary Oliver The domed head rose above the water, white as a spill of milk. It had taken the hook. It swirled and all they could see then was the grinding and breaking of water, its thrashing, the teeth in the grin and grotto of its impossible mouth. The line they refused to cut ran down like a birth cord into the packed and strategic muscles. The sun shone. It was not a large boat. The beast plunged with all it had caught onto, deep under the green waves-a white retching thing, it turned toward the open sea. And it was hours before they came home, hauling their bloody prize, well-gaffed. A hundred gulls followed, picking at the red streams, as it sang its death song of vomit and bubbles, as the blood ran from its mouth that had no speech to rail against this matter speech, that gives us all there may be of the future— speech, that makes all the difference, we like to say. And I say, in the wilderness of our wit we will all cry out last words-heave and spit them into the shattering universe someday, to someone. Whoever He is, count on it: He won’t answer. The inventor is like the hunter—each in the crease and spasm of the thing about to be done is lost in his work. All else is peripheral; remote; unfelt. The connections have broken. Consider the evening: the shark winched into the air; men lifting the last bloody hammers. And Him, somewhere, ponderously lifting another world, setting it free to spin, if it can, in a darkness you can't imagine.

Oxtail Stew, By David Dominguez

At five o’clock in the morning, I walked to work and passed the green ponds of Horizon Park where the last bluegill, caught on the low, slight bank, panted hard in the dark mud, crushed glass, sour bottle caps, whiskey, and the iron weight of heat and smog. This haze stared through eyes gray as the broken window panes on the cheap side of town, and when this haze held you and whispered in your ears its quiet tragedies, it stole your breath quick as time. This is where men gathered to sell peanuts, buckets of oranges, and roses, and they sat on the benches and watched the trucks drive by and disappear.

What I want to say is simple: a man must do more than sell roses where the bums go and beg— he must keep something holy. He must breath the winds that rustle the orchards of the valley where the white almond blooms replenish with their soft scent. He must learn from the Appaloosa when she walks in from the fields and bows her head to a trough of water that reflects nothing but her eyes and the stars.

Shoulder, fat, bone, and loose sheet metal banged out a day-long cacophony. Twenty-eight pounds of spice had to be mixed before the grinder was done. Mustard powder, paprika, salt, and chili powder boiled in my nose, in my eyes, and in the red throb of my hard nicked-up knuckles.

By late morning the meat defrosted, and the boxes began their ooze. Pig parts became easy to recognize. Eighty pounds of guts, kidneys, and stomach fell across my chest each time a box ripped apart. We dared not stop the music of our work: the clack of a clean pine pallet, pink meat and white fat ground to a pulp, sweetened, stuffed, and crimped, the chorizo boxed, the boxes labeled, stacked, and wrapped.

At lunch, I watched Guillermo hunker over the table and dig into his stew—carrots, potatoes, celery, oxtail, and gravy, made from chili peppers and fat, smoldering in a ceramic bowl. Guillermo took out a white cotton napkin and spread it evenly across his lap, picked up a piece of sourdough ripped from a loaf and soaked the bread in the stew for a long time . . . his own tired body taking back what the work took, and he ate. He sucked on chili peppers the color of blood and took another bite of the bread. He sucked out the beef from the eyes of the bones and gnawed on the soft marrow, and he drank hot coffee sweetened con canela. “Eloisa,” he said, “can cook,” and he touched the brown lace crocheted into the edge of his cotton napkin, rubbed his gut, wiped the table, and walked out to complete his work.

Works Cited

Bass, Ellen. "What Did I Love." Ellen Bass. N.p., 20 Jan. 2014. Web. 24 Feb. 2015.

<http://www.ellenbass.com/books/like-a-beggar/what-did-i-love/>.

Dominguez, David. "Oxtail Stew." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 24 Feb. 2015.

<http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/240054>.

Oliver, Mary. “Stanley Kunitz.” New and Selected Poems. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. Print. 18

Oliver, Mary. "The Shark." Kurungabaa. N.p., 27 Dec. 2011. Web. 24 Feb. 2015.

<http://kurungabaa.net/2011/12/28/the-shark-by-mary-oliver/>.