Chain Saw

A very old poem I never published. I'll bet you have some, too.

I’m surprised to find poems in my “Early Poems” file that I hardly remember writing. But when I read them, I am back there in that moment, and glad I wrote a poem about it.

Chain Saw

It’s the noise that draws the groundhog up,
even before wasps loosen and my boots 
break down the creek bank. Thorns fall, 
and her passage into light becomes all light,
her dark hole an open mouth I watch 
swallow her down again, 
down to where she can bury her nose in fur.

But. Look, as soon as the saw stops,
here she comes again, carrying a different 
dark—hunger, no doubt— 
into the inside-out world, her children,
the moon and stars of her dark, that far off, 
not yet born.
I think she smells them, though, 
sharp bursts of longing. 
God, I know, I once took my chances, too,
lumbering out into whatever glory fields 
there were, then, 
left blunted and smoldering.