All winter your brute shoulders strained against
collars, padding
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and
summer,
for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the
simmering range.
In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread
on the fields,
dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own
clustered with oats.
All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and
hayfield, the mowing machine
clacketing beside you, while the sun walked high
in the morning;
and after noon's heat, you pulled a clawed rake
through the same acres,
gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from
stack to stack,
and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy
barn,
three loads of hay a day from standing grass in the
morning.
Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with
the light load
of a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the
sound of hymns.
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the
windowsill
of the stall, smoothing the wood as the seas
smooths glass.
When you were old and lame, when your shoulders
hurt bending to graze,
one October the man, who fed you and kept you,
and harnessed you every morning,
led you through corn stubble to sandy ground
above Eagle Pond,
and dug a hole beside you where you stood 20
shuddering in your skin,
and lay the shotgun's muzzle in the boneless
hollow behind your ear,
and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you
into your grave,
shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod
upright above you,
where by the next summer a dent in the ground
made your monument.
For a hundred and fifty years, in the pasture of 25
dead horses,
roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves
of your ribs,
yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn,
and in winter
frost heaved your bones in the ground—old toilers,
soil makers:
O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester,
Lady Ghost.
