winter chickens

meeting
tree fence and three
shaker village
canterbury, nh

winter chickens

where a tale begins

and where it ends

matters.  Who tells

the story and why. . .

that makes

a difference.

                                Epitaph

                                Mary Doria Russell

In January the

one rooster is late

to begin

the day, late

to wait at the door

and make his comb

flop and shake

over his face

and the cold

going out over

his whole brood

ruffed up

along the old stall

walls, unmoving,

almost unmovable

hens.  Once there was

a cow and her son

and they both stood

walled off, balling,

each on the wean.

Now a dry, froze over

mound of chicken

shit and summer

saw-dust and the old

trough where

my father pours

steaming laying mash

he’s stirred with

an old lath broke off from

the wall in the second shed,

where the plaster’s

cracked and crumbling

anyway, where if I look at it

at the right angle

it resembles that set

of broken off teeth

in the head of the same

calf, a skull I found last

summer up on the old

woods road.  The lath

makes up for the lack

of some other stick

and he makes do: it

comes in just to the top

of the five gallon bucket

and he draws from

the bottom what’s dry into
the middle.  After his deep walk  

out in the new snow,

his open coat I won’t

be a minute

when she asks

accusing him of the cold

but the chickens don’t

know, and with the arrival
of the mash

they stretch

and flap their wings

their rooster cops

his walk between boot-

prints and snow, following

them.  But only

to the threshold.  To

where the dirt ends.

To where the snow (it

was shoveled just

enough to get the swinging-

out door open)

begins.  The old barn 
holds to its own.  Opens

to anything, closes to
anything.  Wind.  Rooster.

Hen.  Mother and son.
Leading them in.  Leading

them out.  One at a time,
or two, depending on

the threshold, the man,
the bucket of steaming

mash, the winter falling
early yet in the season

early yet in the cold,
and what bawls will bawl

softly, like a hinge on a door
closing against the snow.