| A Sheepdog in Winter
The snow is deep and he is old
but two hundred sheep are yarded,
half a mile from feed so
I send him. The snow
is deeper than he is. He coils
himself below its
blank crust to buck into the light like a porpoise.
Each lunge, each crash back in flurry achieves, nearly,
three feet. He has eleven years
and must get eight hundred yards.
Too much love can burst the heart.
In trackless white he strikes
the black, trampled place the snowbacked sheep
have made and drops into his work.
I bid him be furious and dog bites
and dog pulls wool until the golden-eyed,
panting ewes are at my feet. |
Sheep are forgetful
creatures.
They make mud rushing from feeder
to identical feeder seeking perfection
of feed; something extra: they are like us.
Outside this dirty park, an exhausted sheepdog nibbles
the ice between his toes. I shade my eyes
against the glare. Whatever will I
do when he goes into the dark?
For half a mile his outrun is written
in snow: his track/his arc of fidelity
as bright, as fleeting as he is: as the snow.
Donald McCaig |