Because the light has paled and the moon

had wandered west and left the night

to the receding sea, we turn into ourselves

and count our solitudes. The change

we might have wished for had we time

 

to wish is gone. The sacrifice of hours

has endured and we remember nothing of our days.

Neither the hand with the knife nor human gift

is enough to bring fulfillment. Form that was never

ours, the questioning of paradise, the beauty of

 

our minds. Once beyond the sight of land

I saw a flock of crows battle the wind.

Baffled, returning, knowing the landfall,

they beat their wings against a strength

greater than their own. We are all of us

 

as those birds I saw at sea blown outward

against our will. I read the books

and dreamed the dream that words could change

the vision, make of man a perfect animal

and so transformed become immortal.

 

What else was there to dream? Not this,

not this beating against the wind. Chaos

is our creation and the god we wished was man:

to burn again into the thing we are, yet be

black cinders lost at sea, the wild birds failing.

Just to come once alone

to these wild horses

driving out of the high Rockies

raw legs heaving the hip-high snow.

 

Just once alone. Never to see

the men and their trucks.

Just once alone. Nothing moves

as the stallion with five free mares

rush into the guns. All dead.

Their eyes glaze with frost.

Ice bleeds in their nostrils

as the cable hauls them in.

 

Later, after the swearing

and the stamping of feet

we ride down into Golden:

 

Quit bitchin.

It’s a hard bloody life

and a long week

for three hundred bucks of meat.

 

That and the dull dead eyes

and the empty meadows.

Kneeling in the sheep shit

he picked up the biggest of the new rams,

brushed the tail aside,

slit the bag,

tucked the knackers in his mouth

and clipped the cords off clean-

 

the ram         stiff

with a single wild scream

 

as the tar went on

and he spit the balls in a bowl.

 

That's how we used to do it

when I was a boy.

It's no more gawdam painful

than any other way

and you can't have rams fightin,

slammin it up every nanny ...

 

and enjoyed them with him,

cutting delicately

into the deep-fried testicles.

 

Mountain oysters make you strong

 

he said

while out in the field

the rams stood holding their pain,

legs fluttering like blue hands

of old tired men.

Know him for a white man.

He walks sideways into wind

allowing the left of him

 

to forget what the right

knows as cold. His ears

turn into death what

 

his eyes can’t see. All day

he walks away from the sun

passing into storm. Do not

 

mistake him for the howl you hear

or the track you think you

follow: Finding a white man

 

in snow is to look for the dead.

He has been burned by the wind.

He has left too much

 

flesh on winter’s white metal

to leave his colour as a sign.

Cold white. Cold flesh. He leans

 

into wind sideways; kills without

mercy anything to the left of him

coming like madness in the snow.

Thinking on that contest women do

with clothespins in the country

having to hold all the pins in one hand

and they could do it

with hands trained by diapers 

and blue work shirts in winter 

hand-soaping in a steel tub

 

as if it was a measure of survival 

like an axe falling in a far valley 

where sound comes late to you 

or not at all

they having learned it in harder times

cursing the cold

clothes hanging frozen to the line

for days going on days

bringing them in piecemeal

to hang over the fire

and let them melt there

reassuming the shape of a man

in time for him to shrug into

before going down to the graveyard

shift at the mines

 

thinking on that time of trouble

turned into a game

how struggle roots itself in ritual

hands full of clothespins

leaning into wind

never dropping a pin into the snow below