Pahuk

Published Sunday, January 10, 2016

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Pahuk, Nebraska, 1.10.16
 
No longer
give me things that will outlast me,
the sweet accumulation of stuff is over.
 
Don’t get me wrong,
I’m not giving up sweetness
just finding it elsewhere.
 
With friends, for example,
dragging the carcass of a buck
from the edge of the woods to the upland prairie
so that not only coyotes but eagles
can get it.
 
This is sweetness:
tangled up in life to the very end
guts staining snow
gold fur lining a nest maybe
not your own life
just life
and laughing at the shock of it
subzero air
grasping the antlers and leaning into the job
going down hard or softly
in the teeth or beaks or the hands of others.
 
No longer the close abundance
of woods, or the sly infinity of prairie
(which right this moment I so love—the way it rolls away, crests,
disappears and rises up again)
but the open sky
space
a thing that can’t be seen
 
like black ice
or simple syrup.
 
                        Meredith Ann Fuller