Ronda Broatch
WHAT CALLS HER TO WATER
This morning the antler still sways
in the cold of the creek
I wade, tracking the habits of salmon.
Treading between bodies I find myself
jealous of the bones people keep:
bear claw, clavicle, fishbone, scapulae,
limbs lining sills and shelves, uncommon
icons, secrets carelessly dropped,
bits of soul unloosed: what reveals itself
when the house decays, when skin thins,
is borne away. What still lives
shifts direction, swims
across sandbar and rock pool,
into dark recesses, heart
crimson, flesh not yet greying
beneath leaves that dot
the water's surface. A flash of sky
between branches, sometimes November
sun the silver of scales.
VISITATION
Witness the way grass lies flat
beneath the feeder, a fleeting
supplication to the mass it bore.
The burden of frost
is nothing to heat's bristly bulk, bone-
crush of paw, shoulder and haunch.
Wrought iron post, once straight,
now apes the stranger's hunch, curves
in grace to kiss the rimed earth.
Birds flit from eave to limb, agitate
over suet strewn in the foray.
What need born
of hunger comes this late December?
What unfinished moon will tell
of her wonder? Search for signs
furrowed in woodflesh, depressions
etched in winter pasture, an acceptance
of what was, and is, and is to come.
Ronda Broatch is the author of Shedding Our Skins, (Finishing Line Press, 2008), and Some Other Eden, (2005). Nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Web, Ronda is the recipient of a 2007 Artist Trust GAP Grant. One of her poems appeared recently on Verse Daily.
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