Connie Wieneke

Over The Fence

 

            because the comprehensible cannot be kept in           or out / any more than     hope can

            the thirty years’ windrows of snow  or    these           thirsty seeds of Russian      thistle

            salsify or the heedless / dandelions need know          nothing of boundary corners    the

            red flagging or the lath annotated with   letters         &numbers / dare I call them     an

            interpretation of what is mine and not  what is          yours / never a party to the suit  /

            the genome of cud-chewing moose or these white-tailed deer who’ve come       to court

            my currants my arugula my deer tongue lettuce and well—you might say serves        me

            right      sowing deer tongue lettuce    because          what’s comprehensible to me     is

            not to the fostering fox and skunks with  their           scads of kits who secret and scent

            between slat and wire like snow drifts      like           smoke like dust like pollen      like

            my neighbor’s Roundup because fences    are             always in the way of      someone’s

            ache / the weasels come to haunt the hay mice         the newly hatched wrens  even the

            white-crowned sparrow with their  undepend-             able ground nest visible to any&all

            passersby & my thoughts / O Dear Dear Lord tell me / what next what next  as a redtail

            zeroes on a hen already half this earth / this taloned hunger / an angel takes as she must

Today, Beyond The Back Forty

 

Today, beyond the back forty—which to be honest remains
half an acre of tired pasture—a dozen elk have broken off
grazing a neighbors’ newly-laid and trucked-in sod. Look
how the elk, not the rolls of sod, unbend themselves, graceful
perhaps, more likely a weary longing what articulates
when they move. How easy to think they are like pilgrims
and must hunger for more to eat, the quiet of fewer dogs, and
even better footware. I envy them. The angles of their four legs.

The elk, which are not moose, but wapiti, lift their hesitant
gazes to this day’s offerings, eyes and ears alert to what we—
behind our fences and gates, hedges and sheetrock—cannot
see or want to hear. Do they listen beyond the regulated clicks
that array of exacting sprinklers emits? Or is it the crows
mobbing the transplanted aspens what breaks their attention?
Must they not wonder over the manufactured grass, too green, too
free of grit, too full of the stink of us? I wonder what elk think.

Today, I must say I know no more of what emotions they gnaw
than what my father thought fifty years back, that day
he stood beside a fence, the forecast rain soaking through
to our bones, wetting any devotion my siblings and I might have
made up, to earn his transient approval. Even when our father gestured
toward those elk, he offered nothing more than, Well, look at that,
and we did, still obedient, doubtful that he was speaking to us or the elk,
or even into the divorced air, our mother no longer between us.

Since 1983 Connie Wieneke has lived in Wyoming, where her flock of chickens has dwindled, as has her devotion to six months of winter, though not to her husband of nearly forty years. All of her writing is fueled by place and family, the ways in which memory can sometimes be wrong, the contradictions that niggle her to reconsider, again and again. Her most recent or forthcoming work appears in Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Barzakh, Stand (UK), Pilgrimage, Weber: The Contemporary West, High Desert Journal, Split Rock Review, The Forge Literary Magazine, Talking River Review, and others. Her prose and poetry also have appeared in several anthologies, including Orison 6 Anthology and Rewilding: Poems for the Environment. She received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana and two literary fellowships from Wyoming Arts Council.