The Bloodhound’s Poem
The hound bred for blood
wants in this poem.
When she
rushes the stanza, I can’t help
but flinch. Here’s her paw
on my page where I don’t
want it. It’s far too late
to collar her for
my metaphor—we both
know she can cross an acre
in a flash, that the road means
nothing to her. Those
russet
swaying jowls are not the dog
I’d conjure. But territorial rage
and all, she’s here, with her
more than human need,
her bay and bite.
Maybe I’m the intruder
in her poem, the
poem where
she’s had my scent for days
as I’ve stumbled upwind,
adrift in winter, dragging
the sky like a mottled rose.
Father’s Clock
Jangling behind the driver’s seat, its face
still handsome beneath broken glass, your clock
of Saturday morning windings, your clock
of the solemn gong, of the wide-cheeked face
fit for the storybook key, of the pacing
hours, the high up reach, you tall at the clock
of the lacey hands and wood-shine, the clock
whose pendulum you stilled so we could sleep.
How I lived the slow, deliberate turning,
diurnal reckonings across each week—
now I fear the broken times returning
as we gather up our mother’s things. Gong
at the stop light and at the hard right. She
has no need of time and you’re long gone. Gong.
Kathryn Kirkpatrick lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of
North Carolina, where she is a Professor of English at Appalachian State
University. She has a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies from Emory University,
where she received an Academy of American Poets poetry prize. Her poetry collections include The Body’s
Horizon (1996), which was selected by Alicia Ostriker for the NC Poetry
Society’s Brockman-Campbell award; Beyond Reason (2004), which was awarded the Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Prize by
the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association; Out of the Garden (2007), which was a finalist for the Southern
Independent Booksellers Association poetry award; Unaccountable Weather (2011); Our
Held Animal Breath (2012) which was selected by Chard DeNiord for the
Brockman-Campbell Award; and Her Small
Hands Were Not Beautiful (2014), selected by Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda for
the Brockman-Campbell Award. She has
held writing residencies at Norton Island in Maine and the Tyrone Guthrie
Center in Ireland. Her long poem about Maud Gonne in six voices was performed
in 2013 as part of the Yeats Summer School festivities
in Sligo, Ireland. As a literary scholar
in Irish studies and the environmental humanities, she has published essays on
class trauma, eco-feminist poetics, and animal studies.
