One-Way Gate
I was moving the herd from the lower pastureto the loading pen up by the road.It was cold and their mouths steamed like torn bread.The gate swung on its wheel, knocking at the herdas they pushed through. They stompedand pocked the freezing mud with their hooves.This was January. I faced backward into the hard year.The herd faced forward as the herd always does,muscling through the lit pane of winter air.It could have been any gate, any moment when things goone way and not the other—an act of tendernessor a small, cruel thing done with a pocketknife.A child being born. Or the way we movefrom sleeping to dreams, as a river flows uneasy under ice.Of course, nothing can ever be returned to exactly.In the pen the herd nosed the fence and I forked them hay.A few dry snowflakes swirled the air. The truck would be therein an hour. Hey, good girl. Go on. Get on, girl.
Feature Date
- September 17, 2019
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Copyright © 2018 by Jenny George
Originally published in THE DREAM OF REASON
Copper Canyon Press
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Jenny George is the author of The Dream of Reason (Copper Canyon Press, 2018). She is also a winner of the “Discovery”/ Boston Review Poetry Prize and a recipient of fellowships from The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Lannan Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, Ploughshares, Narrative, Granta, Iowa Review, FIELD, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. Jenny lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she works in social justice philanthropy.
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—Stephen Greenblatt, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Tyrant
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