Reading 'Lives of the Animals' by Robert Wrigley

I chewed your words with my morning

coffee and watched drivers peel out

of their driveways, while you crawled

“along the thoroughfare

of snakes.” Then I ate a peach and sweetbreads.

I went inside the mouse mummy, kissed

your horse—but not the dead one,

the billion flies that rose as a horse,

the other horse dead, too, by the “snake in the trough.”

I followed Highway 12 past page 50 thinking

of my mother at the table in assisted living,

and after another cup of coffee I went back

to watch you kick a nest of mice into the empty

hog pen. I had hefted an aspen-leafed nest

of rats in the bird house over my own fence.

I watched you send your father’s frozen

puddle of blood “like a stone into the woods” on page 73—

and it dawned: I had only two

of your poems to go. I looked up in time

to see last night’s moon, white

as the round stone I’d found on the 39-degree

morning in a bed of shriveling kelp on the beach

full moon perched on top of a fir, as if a father

had climbed a ladder to put the angel on top of the tree.

Even if I don’t believe in angels, in wishing on dead

stars—sometimes something comes,

as you said, something to open a “coarse

inexplicable soul to their sight.”