On cross country road trips, my father sang,
old songs he made us learn at least to hum,
my mother snapping along in the front seat,
their daughter untethered in the back.
He sang Oh, Susanna, he sang There’s a Hole
in the Bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza,
he sang Maybellene (why can’t you be true?),
songs with pet names for all of us.
Today I’ve sprung him from Assisted Living,
a picnic in the park, then the Dog Museum.
I’ll pay to see the Huneck exhibit,
the wood cuts and chairs, admire
the exquisite porcelain Great Dane,
a harlequin. My father’s done well
with his therapy dogs, their soft coats
bring back his days of raising hounds,
a young father, before the suits and ties,
before the suburbs. He loves best the room
which houses the war dogs exhibit,
old Rin Tin Tin and the Yorkie, Smoky.

As we enter the parking lot, circle
for a spot his chair can handle,
he starts to sing, he sings Way Down Yonder
in the Land of Buttons...he sings loudly,
his voice echoes across the lot, reaches
a woman walking her whippet, she’s startled,
the dog turns toward us. My father
ignores the woman, says isn’t that the same dog
your friend had in high school? Wasn’t she the one
who died of a self-inflicted woe?
What happened to her dog? Was he sad, too?
Before I can begin to answer,
my father starts to sing, he sings This Old Man—
knick knack paddywack, give the dog a bone!
This old man came rolling home. By the time
we travel the museum’s ramp, he has sung
all ten verses, and I’m Liza again, mending.

I try a new way of imagining people 
as dogs
as dogs it makes sense 
why anyone would be drawn to do anything 
just as dogs rub themselves 
in patches of grass
or suddenly lick a face

as dogs you can surely forgive
your mother
because she makes a funny dog
with frilly fur and worried eyes
and as a dog, is it so bad 
you spend so much time
recalling a certain smell
or staring too long and too intently
at a torn leaf in a hot tub 

a dog falls ill and says nothing
over time, they destroy the things they love

picture whoever is giving you trouble 
or whatever part of you desires more than it has
then see a dog 
pulling against the chain gripping his neck
or barely moving under a bench
watch the dog run away from everything it knows
do you blame them?

As if there could be a world
Of absolute innocence
In which we forget ourselves

The owners throw sticks
And half-bald tennis balls
Toward the surf
And the happy dogs leap after them
As if catapulted—

Black dogs, tan dogs,
Tubes of glorious muscle—

Pursuing pleasure
More than obedience
They race, skid to a halt in the wet sand,
Sometimes they'll plunge straight into
The foaming breakers

Like diving birds, letting the green turbulence
Toss them, until they snap and sink

Teeth into floating wood
Then bound back to their owners
Shining wet, with passionate speed
For nothing,
For absolutely nothing but joy.

But the moths find you, phantom.

       & the crackle
       of the javelinas
       in the brush

       old litany
       defiled the doorling
       stood canon toting

So, you know the ground here? Where else 
is new or to you called unknown:

       gumtree tipping
       onto the marsh 
       meadow’s shoreline

The apology wends off as smoke ground to 
gravel. So you were here alright, coughing 
on the live tape:

       a canoe’s 
       mystery 
       hurt by its name

Fall back with your hands before or behind 
you just so.

The wine of uncharted days,
Their unsteady stance against the working world,

The intense intoxication of nothing to be done,
A day off,

The dance of the big-hearted dog 
In us, freed into a sudden green, an immense field:

Off we go, more run than care, more dance—
If a polka could be done not in a room but straight

Ahead, into the beautiful distance, the booming 
Sound of the phonograph weakening, but our legs

Getting stronger with their bounding practice:
This day, that feeling, drunkenness

Born of indecision, lack of focus, but everything 
Forgiven: Today is a day exposed for what it is,

A workday suddenly turned over on its back, 
Hoping to be rubbed.

I come from hay and barns, raising 
chickens. In spring, lambs come. 

You got to get up, fly early, do the orphan run 
sleep till dawn, start the feeding. 

When the electricity shuts off, you boil water, you crack ice. 
You keep the animals watered. 

You walk through the barn, through the hay smell,
your hair brittle where you chopped it with scissors 

same ones you use for everything. Your sweater has holes. 
When you feed the ram lambs, you say goodbye. 

Summer, choke cherries; your mouth’s dry. Apples, cider. 
Corn picking. Canning for weeks that feel like years. 

Chopping heads off quail, rabbits, chickens. 
You can pluck a chicken, gut it fast. 

You find unformed eggs, unformed chicks. 
They start chirping day nineteen. 

You make biscuits and gravy for hundred kids 
serve them up good. You’re the chick 

who never got past day nineteen, never found your chick voice. 
You make iced tea. They say, you’re a soldier in the king’s army. 

At night, you say to yourself, Kathy, someday. 
We go walking. We go talking. We find a big story. 

A cracking egg story. A walking girl story. 
A walking out of the woods story. A not slapped silly story. 

A not Jesus story. Hush, Kathy you say, we get out of here. 
We find out where chicks go when they learn to fly.

^{—For Trina and Barb of Animal Haven Farm Sanctuary, Asheville, North Carolina}

1.
Reader, meet the two women who sunk
everything they had into taking in broken
animals—the gimpy and oozing
critters, the ugly, lopsided, tail-less

pets, urine-soaked and drooling, zested
with fleas, the matted and discarded
scrapheaps left growling and bucking, pissing
on everything, the good-riddance left roped
to a chain-link fence.

No, I take that back.
Instead I want you to be

those two: I want you crazy
enough to try to fix those beasts—
to feed and brush and bathe and dip and
sweetmilk them whole; I want you to try,
to always try, despite the odds,

just as you coaxed the docile
fat-blind pig up on legs that eventually
broke from his own inbred
weight, just as you spritzed the mites
off a mangy hen that would be limp
in the claws of a hawk
later that same day. On the hill, a stubborn
but sometimes gentle sheep grows
cold under a blue tarp,
and in your truck is a towel across
the backseat for your favorite
but neurotic-as-hell dog, how you rushed her
to the vet only to see her
put down.

2.
No, let me make this real—

Reader, I want you tired, every joint
in your body stiff and worn.

I want you to finally strip off
your filthy clothes. Then, I want you jolted

from sleep by a cry that in your dreams
sounds like an infant wailing

and, now awake,

sounds just the damn same.

3.
Go. Find that kid goat
bleating in the grainy dark.

He’s no bigger than a lap dog,
and on his fist-sized head are the buds

of his horns—tiny, like
two popcorn pieces of warm bone—

two bright spots, the only thing
you can see.

Flip on the switch.
Now, you know.

With bare hands I want you to
clear the froth from his lolling

tongue. I want you to grab a rag,
a sponge, the corner of your shirt—
anything you can find—to sop
up the liquid—so much of it
you can’t tell what’s what—be it
mucus or bile or vomit or blood—
as if every water has been brought up
for this giving-in, as if his body
is already a river and rushing

away. Now, use your arms:

it takes strength to steady the
convulsing of a thing even this young,
and then, once his gaze rolls back to

white, you know what to do, you know

your job: push together the furred slits
of his lids, close the extinguished
horizons of his eyes.

4.
Don’t play stupid. You knew
this was coming. You’ve seen it

enough times. You’re not dumb,
just desperate to try

to save this little meat
goat the farmer dumped
at your door,
too septic and riddled
with worms

to even be killed

to eat.

5.
Now, get on your knees.

Mop it up. As you wring
out the rags don’t push away
what you know of the sun,
let yourself admit the light,

how it made his ears pink and transparent

revealed the secret veins of leaves,
how you adored it when they periscoped
to your voice and he looked up to
give you the small meditations
of fresh milk and hay in his mouth.

Go on. Get sentimental
if you have to—have a good cry—

no one is here, and besides,
who would care? Because you try,
don’t you? You always try.
But always, that impossible
riddle, always the word

riddled with the word
worms, as if each whip-like body was curled
into a question, a wriggling puzzle, a mob
infestation of questions—parasites that love

a home so hard they turned that kid goat
anemic, fevering, stuttering with a murmuring

heart, shitting out a writhing

pile of larvae and eggs. Little sips—

little hooks—little burrows—this was how,
little by little, that little goat finally

collapsed, arched his throat back
as if to be slit, jerked his legs up into the
nothing like the fetus he was
just two months before.

6.
But here is the point: Do not ever
let yourself think it didn’t matter.

It mattered then
as it matters now, because until

this morning rose dull on the horizon

with this useless, good-for-nothing
goat now dead on your floor,

regardless, in spite of, no matter,
you fed a beast worthless, a real

lost cause not unlike

this whole stubborn,
beautiful, fucked-up planet
about to seize and drown
in its own melt.

7.
There really wasn’t a thing you could
do, but admit it: if you knew,
if you really could say he would not have died
last night but would certainly die
tomorrow, you’d force yourself

out of bed and do what it is you do:

you’d count his pills, warm his formula
over the stove, rake out his soiled pen,
and with arms wide, you’d bring him
a fresh bale of hay. Yes, that’s right: now say

his silly goat name—because, yes, every living
thing deserves a name—and you called him

Peanut, a playful way to say
he was a flake of the size he should have been,
so sick he did not jump or play as
he should but leaned his tiny face
exhausted into your leg. Now, bend

to stroke his scrawny
goat neck. Say, Good boy, Peanut.
We’ve got you. Now, now
there. Everything’s gonna be just fine.
You know it’s

a lie, but no matter.

Hope, you know by now,
is not a thing you feel
but something you do,
and this is your job. It’s what
you do; it’s what needs to be
done.

Today my brother brought over a piece of the ark

wrapped in a white plastic grocery bag.

He set the bag on my dining table, unknotted it,

peeled it away, revealing a foot-long fracture of wood.

He took a step back and gestured toward it

with his arms and open palms—

          It’s the ark, he said.

          You mean Noah’s ark? I asked.

          What other ark is there? he answered.

          Read the inscription, he told me.

          It tells what’s going to happen at the end.

          What end? I wanted to know.

          He laughed, What do you mean, ‘What end?’

          The end end.

Then he lifted it out. The plastic bag rattled.

His fingers were silkened by pipe blisters.

He held the jagged piece of wood so gently.

I had forgotten my brother could be gentle.

He set it on the table the way people on television

set things when they’re afraid those things might blow up

or go off—he set it right next to my empty coffee cup.

It was no ark—

it was the broken end of a picture frame

with a floral design carved into its surface.

He put his head in his hands—

          I shouldn’t show you this—

          God, why did I show her this?

          It’s ancient—O, God,

          this is so old.

         

          Fine, I gave in. Where did you get it?

          The girl, he said. O, the girl.

          What girl? I asked.

          You’ll wish you never knew, he told me.

I watched him drag his wrecked fingers

over the chipped flower-work of the wood—

          You should read it. But, O, you can’t take it—

          no matter how many books you’ve read.

He was wrong. I could take the ark.

I could even take his marvelously fucked fingers.

The way they almost glittered.

It was the animals—the animals I could not take—

they came up the walkway into my house,

cracked the doorframe with their hooves and hips,

marched past me, into my kitchen, into my brother,

tails snaking across my feet before disappearing

like retracting vacuum cords into the hollows

of my brother’s clavicles, tusks scraping the walls,

reaching out for him—wildebeests, pigs,

the oryxes with their black matching horns,

javelinas, jaguars, pumas, raptors. The ocelots

with their mathematical faces. So many kinds of goat.

So many kinds of creature.

I wanted to follow them, to get to the bottom of it,

but my brother stopped me—

          This is serious, he said.

          You have to understand.

          It can save you.

So I sat down, with my brother ruined open like that,

and two by two the fantastical beasts

parading him. I sat, as the water fell against my ankles,

built itself up around me, filled my coffee cup

before floating it away from the table.

My brother—teeming with shadows—

a hull of bones, lit by tooth and tusk,

lifting his ark high in the air.

Here, we have survived another year—take this bounty, our love,
the resistance we feel between our teeth as seeds crack
and extend their pale finger-selves into paper towel
then earth, buried alive so they may grow into green billowing,
we will eat as a new promise, sauté in garlic, olive oil, feed
to one another as if to say, There is no distance between taking
and giving, a ritual of regret carried out beside the deer head
on the porch, its skin flaked to sodden leather, dark as leaf mulch,
and my hands have traced the pale, trifold stitching of skull,
and I have been in mud today, I have cleaned up shit, clotted
through boxes of frozen chicken—leg after leg split and stacked
like cordwood into the box, splintered bone, flesh skinned pink,
a cold meat—and your hands have set the cinderblocks for a woodshed,
have split the kindling, have dug the grave for the dog who lies
rotting against ledge-rock four-feet down in a frost heave waiting
until the irises spread up over his brindled, poisoned bloom,
his cancer-chewed paw, his canines shining white as the moon
that slips naked to run against our snow-spread lawn as we stand
in front of the door, your arms folding me into you
until I feel it, our hardness—the bicep and bruise of all
the sap buckets we have lifted and poured, every bag of grain hauled,
bale of hay thrown, animals we have mended and killed, tasted, tricked
to the slaughter, every potato forked from the ground, each nail
pounded, the boards above and below us—how all of it binds us,
grafts us, one into the other—our freshly harrowed skin.

Few things that grow here poison us.
Most of the animals are small.
Those big enough to kill us do it in a way
Easy to understand, easy to defend against.
The air, here, is just what the blood needs.
We don’t use helmets or special suits.

The Star, here, doesn’t burn you if you
Stay outside as much as you should.
The worst of our winters is bearable.
Water, both salt and sweet, is everywhere.
The things that live in it are easily gathered.
Mostly, you can eat them raw with safety and pleasure.

Yesterday my wife and I brought back
Shells, driftwood, stones, and other curiosities
Found on the beach of the immense
Fresh-water Sea we live by.
She was all excited by a slender white stone which:
“Exactly fits the hand!”

I couldn’t share her wonder;
Here, almost everything does.

All frantic and drunk with new warmth, the bees
buzz and blur the holly bush.
Come see.
Don’t be afraid. Or do, but
everything worth admiring can sting or somber.
Fix your gaze upward and
give bats their due,
holy with quickness and echolocation:
in summer’s bleakest hum, the air
judders and mosquitoes blink out,
knifed into small quick mouths. Yes,
lurking in some unlucky bloodstreams
might be rabies or histoplasmosis, but almost
no one dies and you
owe the bats for your backyard serenity.
Praise the cassowary, its ultraviolet head, its
quills and purposeful claws. Only one
recorded human death, and if a boy
swung at you, wouldn’t you rage back? Or P.
terribilis, golden dart frog maligned by Latin,
underlauded and unsung, enough poison to
vex two elephants into death but ardent
with eggs and froglets, their protection a neon
xyston. And of course,
yes, humans. Remarkable how our
zeal for safety manifests: poison, rifle, vanishment.