Near the East Fork of the Toklat
in the season that’s never dark
I lugged my gear back from the road

and while I slept through dusk
a noise like trash in the suburbs
being clattered away woke me up.
When I stuck my head out of the tent flap
the hoofed creatures were gone
but what I saw at eye-level,

like a fury sculpted in ice
brought me to my knees.
Once I’d wanted to paint a canvas

some huge fanatical blue
where the hungers of the world
could settle and be soothed.

Ten feet away, ears pricked
nose flaring, the silver-gray
pursuer stared me in the face,

then sensing I wasn’t prey
whirled off along the river,
and I watched him shrink to a point

in imaginary time
fleet as the fastest athlete
I’d ever seen in my life.
                        

for Bob Grenier 

Your guests had to wade through 
a pigsty, so you’d greet us at the gate 
and prod those massive porkers out of the way
with the handle of a broom.		

In back of the rented house, we strolled
in the shade of walnuts and mused on 
our trade, while you bagged the fallen fruit— 
which wasn’t like stealing, you said, 

since they’d only rot on the ground. 
Inside, you laid out the treasures 
you’d picked up last summer at Groliers,
the latest Ashbery teasers and another 

little-known poet whose bare-boned
fluted quatrains, cold 
as the Minnesota sky, you’d squint 
and cackle at. You read the world 

like that—through the eyes 
of poetry—until sky and piglets and 
walnuts (which Emily baked into pies) 
unshackled my bookish soul

and my love began to unfurl 
the first acceptable stanzas 
I ever wrote, while Emily, 
as her pregnancy advanced, 

jotted on greasy napkins, 
God knows how, the knock-out 
poem of the year in the bitchy 
fastidious voice of a mother sow.