TWO POEMS
by Anita Barrows
 

PASTORALE


Once I came to a pasture fence
just after a ewe
had dropped twin lambs. It was
January, my life
was breaking apart. I stood

& watched as the long
glistening blue & red placenta
like a great rope of sea-kelp
slid out of her, & the firstborn lamb
nuzzled her teat, its scraggy tail
crazy with want. But the second lamb
lay in damp straw, shivering,
flailing to right itself
& then giving up,
until I thought

I should climb over, wrap it
in my jacket, rub its belly & legs.
Not knowing if I would help it or harm it
what I did was watch, hating
my ignorance, my indecision;

and when at last it had heaved itself up & nursed
& was lying, satisfied,
there where it was born,
its mother bleated & came
to me anyway over the grass, touched her nose

to my hand, let me reach through the fence
to feel the nubby black heads
of her children, still wet

with the blood & fluid
of their first world, & with some thin
forgiving rain

that had started to fall
in this one

FOR THE UNBORN

1

Bronze light of early fall. The sky
pulsing, stars clear & precise.
We are waiting for you, we
who are standing here with all our questions.
Here where the leaf that began
only months ago
breaks from its twig. Here
in this world of softness & brokenness
where shadows are lengthening
into other shadows.

2

When my child was small I taught her to swim.
It was autumn. The lake had been gathering warmth
all summer. I held her hand
& walked with her into the water, listening
for frogs, for insects, for the splashes the dog made
bounding in ahead of us. Between the sky
& the lakebed my child
kicked back her legs. Water
parted & closed.
She knew she was held
by me, by something other than me.

She was my child.
I was her mother
& a vein.

A vessel. A root she emerged from.

The trees' dazzling reflections
weaving around & around us.

3

Now you are whoever you are. There is nothing
that claims you.

4

What is it you know that everyone
forgets? Here,

like the lake, we rock back & forth.
Pushing against our limits, shaped
by our pushing.

And this
is how we have been living: the sky

tumbles into us.
The mud at the bottom is stirred,

propels itself to the surface.

How will we know you?
What will you carry over to us

from that place where nothing is defined,
where everything

is movement & stillness,
possible & dissolving?