North, by ALISON HAWTHORNE DEMING

Morning. The dark horses

absorb sunlight, sheep

graze fast as fall shrinks

the feast, time unhomogenized

by doing twice-daily chores--

feeding salt in the heat,

molasses in the cold--not missing

the moment when you go into

the barn in a snowstorm,

the sky does a quick grey-to-blue

and you come out to maple trees,

weed stalks, even the barbed-wire fence

wearing a thin skin of ice.

Seen at just the right angle,

the sunlight fires that skin to gold,

just for a moment, before clouds

crowd in and even with the stove

stoked full you’ll be cold for hours

but not really mind. The old neighbor

saws all winter by hand--

body stiff as wood, bending slow

to the sawhorse, baling twine

hanging from porch rafters in loops

the size of muskrat legs.

Summers--he milks his cow

right in the pasture

and she doesn’t walk away.

From “Science and Other Poems” by Alison Hawthorne Deming. (Louisiana State University Press: $17.95; 80 pp.) 1994 Reprinted by permission.