Sean Sexton: Plea
An evening has passed, and a young cow is still
crying among the herd this morning like the widow
in the Bible who wouldn’t leave an ill-tempered
judge alone.
Sean Sexton: Planting Aeschynomene Seed
It pours from a muslin sack like sunlight
through a cracked window shade, fifty pounds
to a metal washtub, old as your footsteps.
Sean Sexton: Semen Testing the Herd Bulls
We push them in trios
and quartets—bellowing down the lane
—a rider betwixt to stage them
strategically in the pens. Once
arrived, the usual upstart gets thrown
through a fence.
Sean Sexton: Fool’s Day
Was it they’d mostly finished their work,
how the bulls came along this morning, let
themselves be driven back to their pasture
still in ruin with holes dug from last year’s
nine-month layoff?
Sean Sexton: Lightening
Did I learn the wrong word or is this world indeed lessening
whether gradually or at once, and another lovely pine
of my familiar horizon assumed the sorrel countenance
of demise
Sean Sexton: Final
The broken-legged bull will be slaughtered today—an
end to his struggle if nothing else.
Sean Sexton: Angelic
I see how it is with them, left to their own pursuits
in our absence: the forgotten gate merely ajar
between the two pastures, kept that way for days
Sean Sexton: Hold What You Got
Mayhem, butchery, and sheer witlessness
have grown acute with time and become the order of things.
Frogs creak in brief aubade
Christopher J. Preston: Wolf restoration in Colorado shows how humans are rethinking their relationships with wild animals
Recovering animals encounter a world that is markedly different from the one in which they declined, especially in terms of how people think about wildlife.
