"Be as a ringing glass . . . "
by B. J. Buckley
“Be as a ringing glass until, ringing, you shatter.” – Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus
Wind scatters fat snowflakes over the barley stubble,
late crop of stars.
Shepherd of frost.
Tendrils of fog thread high branches
of the Russian olives like memories
escaped from old women.
Pheasants clatter up, bright cock and two hens
punctuating the brittle pages of air.
Rows of round bales, summer’s abacus.
The heart makes lists of things
it must not forget. Forgets.
How to live, in this time, in this place?
Scattering those torn compendiums, those little papers,
softer than snow.
Poor sheep in the gully,
suffocated under drifts.
Red blotches where the lambs were birthed
in white March, in the sage.
Nothing ever promised justice.
Fate spinning her crooked wheel.
I've always wanted to touch the deer
who come when ice crust locks away the grass
to browse at the sweet yellow bricks of hay.
Imagine their rough tongues
baptizing the palms of your hands,
the soft benediction of their slender ears.
If they were gods they might hear you.
In June they will be invisible,
sheltered in the windbreak, broken
silhouettes of shadow and light.
B.J. Buckley is a Montana poet who has worked as a teaching artist in Arts-in-Schools and Communities programs throughout the West and Midwest for over four decades. She has recent/forthcoming work in Calyx, Grub Street, Sugar House Review, and Whitefish Review.
