Jenne’ R. Andrews: Out There

One night when I was star-watching, fathoming
the Dipper in its clockwise course over the north

pasture, a neighbor shot a pig out on the edge
of the dark. He had taken her behind his barn;

from far off I heard her squealing, a rifle’s crack,
then silence. The stars wept some of their fire,

flickering in hesitation, their power shorting out
for a second as the lights do in ice storms,

when the glossy poplar boughs hang so heavily
over the kennel and the ghost of my bereft bitch

who bore fifteen and had no milk, ranges in
the frozen trees, keening for her lost young.

That is what I think, anyway, because of how
I got my bones, putting a calf to sleep,

her head in my lap, letting those fading whelps
go on down to Jordan in a shallow pan of water.

I hope that the air smothers me gently like
water when I die, and that I see the great wheel

of the stars overhead, the hemispheric sky clock
tolling the hour, someone calling to me from afar–

a Te Deum, an absolution. Because I loved
my calf, I rocked her, holding an ethered cloth

to her mouth as a vet had taught me and she
thanked me with her eyes; I had wanted to do

the same for my father with his blistered lungs,
all the years running out of air yet keeping on

to tend us, but I wasn’t brave enough. Not long
after my heifer was taken away by la carretera

de la muerte, new pups slid like small creek trout
into my lap; I broke them from their sacs and they

gasped into life as I put my thumbs on the back
of each one’s head, swinging it down to clear

its airway. More than enough of it was like this—
death, then a mote of life coming into being,

something new flickering on the Milky Way’s
perimeter, then out there, the dying back

of the light, the receding of the caress,
the aversion of the eyes– the phenomenon

of things absenting themselves from your life
right in front of you—as when you’re speaking

what your heart holds to someone who then recedes
into all the untallied and star-crossed years.

.

—for Ethna McKiernan

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Copyright 2016 Jenne’ R. Andrews