As It Happens

As hay bends and divides beneath the blades, as the terrier,
vigilant, courts the danger of the tractor tires,
my uncle's harvester
grumbles to a standstill.
He's hit a pheasant nest unwittingly
in the tall palisades of yellow grasses,
and dismounts. Somehow the hen still lives,
however frenzied, and now at the field's far end
she careers around the thick shoulders of lower branches,
thrashing and tilling the air, but won't alight
with those raw and glistening nubs where her legs
once were. And here in this rousted place
where she had once scratched aside the dirt
and hatched out several chicks—the terrier
gnashes the half-dead things, his teeth
drawing in the flattened corpus of down
and parody of stricken yellow claws, until we try
to stay the horror: snatch the dead nestling
from the obdurate jaw; flag my uncle's jacket after
the skeet of stumbling feathers so that the hen
wheezes forth a phrase, bewildered, and lurches
into the hopeless shelter of other fields.
There's an end to it.

And when the growing season has ebbed,
we'll deny again what the terrier's teeth
were meant for all along. Somewhere,
the viscous coil of the terrier's spoor
sinks below the moss. Somewhere, the thorny
bits of claws and bones hedge themselves
in roots. Somewhere, the thresher
has long since flocked the field
with a pale distance of dirt, and a bird
will never drop from the sky. Somehow,
we were never there to see it happen.

© Karl J. Sherlock