It's hard to say just where you took this photograph.
It could have been last winter on your farm in Massachusetts
or maybe farther north.
A man in the foreground carries a sheep.
Snow crumbles around him like bread.
He heads for a barn
or maybe just a light.
Behind him a dog, or a wolf, follows,
whether stalking or shepherding
or just holding on
I don't know.
And you, you would have been walking backwards in front of them,
falling away as they came on,
worried about your settings in the changing light.
After a long hiatus working as a journalist, Ann Cale is writing poetry again. In the 1980s her poems appeared in US1: An Anthology: Contemporary Writing from New Jersey, the U.S. 1# Worksheet, and the Berkeley Poet’s Co-op Worksheets. In 1980, she received a grant from the New Jersey Council of the Arts for a poetry manuscript.
