Reprinted from David Baker's new book, Never-Ending Birds (W. W. Norton, 2009), with permission of the author:
The Rumor
Come home.
The earth utters
to the body, and so the body does
—come home—at last.
Consider thus
the tufts and tail piece,
hooves cleft from the legs, the legs
what’s left of them where
they dropped con-
centric beneath
the beech. Consider the beech,
the lovers’ owne
tree, this one, yes,
hearts scored-in
and someone’s, and someone else’s, initials
so swollen
they’re unreadable and
more-than-head-
high-up the trunk.
Up the trunk—where the body crawled.
Think of that.
A furious, rapt hunger.
We thought it a rumor
when the farmer
called the paper,
when deputies spotted
something—
“buff deer or maybe a Dane running
loose in the
corn”—in the feedlot,
three nights running. Look.
There is no doubt whatever.
So the body,
even the lover, comes
down to the earth. But not,
this time, at first.
The big cat dragged
the corpse up
the tree—they
will do that, that’s how we know, cats being
climbers
with prey they’ve killed
—up, by the bole, the big place,
to the crotch of the tree, that’s what
we call it.
And crouched; ate; shat;
even slept. The claw marks
proceed up the tree. The fleshy
dun bark, blood
stripped brown as
fox coat or
wet sandstone, blood ascending the tree’s
evident body. Up
the lovers’ tree.
Then the body fell, at
least in little pieces,
all around the trunk,
spattered, strewn—
aureole of deer guts, bitten
skin, bone. The rest went
on again,
in the body of the beast.
And so—we hear—the lovers
do this, too.
Never-Ending Birds
That’s us pointing to the clouds. Those are clouds
of birds, now we see, one whole cloud of birds.
There we are pointing out the car windows.
October. Gray-blue-white olio of birds.
Never-ending birds, you called the first time—
years we say it, the three of us, any
two of us, one of those just endearments.
Apt clarities. Kiss on the lips of hope.
I have another house. Now you have two.
That’s us pointing with our delible whorls
into the faraway, the trueborn blue-
white unfeathering cloud of another year.
Another sheet of their never ending.
There’s your mother wetting back your wild curl.
I’m your father. That’s us three, pointing up.
Dear girl. They will not—it’s we who do—end.
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