Windbreak
I’m walking the row of pines
toward fields I do not own,
where my daughter comes riding
on a horse we do not own.
Still—to see my daughter come riding
who was once so small.
Above, a kingbird
chases a Swainson’s hawk
in the unseasonable heat
of a sky that all of us own.
They move, apart
from all the historical
wrongness of their names.
Now is the name I give
to the horse we do not own.
She is riding Now into the cottonwoods.
Their shapes, curved like sandbars
in the river of wind.
I Like Certain Mammals
For the habit some of them possess
of looking into your eyes and seeing
neither prey nor predator, nor competitor
for food, but you, in your you-ness—
uniquely alive, and looking back
into their own eyes: a seeing in kind.
And the way that some of them accept
absurd names we give them, and respond.
When my daughter and I walk down the alley
where Beauregard lives for now
in a one-room back house rented
by his grad student owner, we take unfeigned
pleasure at his pleasure in seeing us.
Beauregard is one of these boutique breeds
with a name ending in “—doodle.”
Huge, curly, hummock-headed; a sopping
welcome mat of a tongue—Beau is as unwitting
of the tumor inside him, as of the vet
coming at noon to put him down.
To put him down. Put him to sleep. The bland
platitudes of privilege: I know
there are persons who in their thirst
would envy the dust-filmed tin of hose water
and drool from which Beau slurps his fill—
the dog whose dying is accorded
such dignity. And I’m just about to say
something of this to my daughter;
but doesn’t she know, already, the nature
of our habit, as a species, of casually ignoring…
Besides, what strikes me this morning
is something else, something I like
about our species: how this connection
with certain mammals is what some humans,
lucky enough to have a choice,
will choose to do. Today, as Beauregard
flops his smiling head once more
in my lap, I am pleased to take my lead
from the dying, shaggy dog.
William Wenthe has received awards from the NEA, the Texas Commission on the Arts, and two Pushcart Prizes. His fifth book of poems is The Gentle Art, published by LSU Press, which has much to do with the life and art of James McNeill Whistler. He teaches at Texas Tech University.
Read one poem in seven parts by William Wenthe, “Rotherhithe”, appearing in Terrain.org.
Header photo by Koldunov, courtesy Shutterstock.
