The Vast Land (a fragment)
I. Neither seer nor cards
April is not the cruelest month to a goat
standing, four months pregnant, in the door of her shed
shaking from her fur the air-born droplets,
looking wearily out at the February rain.
Given the rain soaked muck of her pen,
the incessant, pervasive drizzle,
and the impenetrable gray of the sky,
neither seer nor cards needs she
to tell her to fear death by water. She knows
(as well as a goat knows anything)
that it is wet.
She does not like to get her feet wet,
and certainly not her head;
it makes her hooves soft, and a wet coat
to a goat, in a chilling wind, is death.
So she drops her pellets where she sleeps,
and urinates only rarely, so that when the rain
slackens, she produces a torrent of her own,
creating a more pungent puddle among the
water islands of her pen. She drinks little,
and most of the time stands staring
out at the rain.
What a cold wet hell is February to one
whose house leaks, drip dripping water
into her food dish, but this goat at least
has one dry spot, granted by a makeshift
patch on the roof, one spot where she can stand
and look out at the day's eternity of gray;
others, whose shepherds are not so
attentive, and do not even make shift to patch
a hole, do not even provide a
regular feed dish, much less regular feed, are
not so lucky.
Until I went out to the pasture to see them,
I had not thought there could be so many
shivering in February's icy drizzle,
a whole herd of goats with no dry place
to stand, no wall to break the wind, no
dish from which to feed. These are the bush
goats, eaters of briers, clearers of land,
set free to roam and fend as best they can
by the farmer who wants only an easier path
through the forest. A good shepherd would not
do such a thing.
But the goat who stands in the pen in the
yard might not fare so well in the
pasture, unused as she is to fighting
for feed at the trough. She has come to need me, and she
is quite insistent if I am remiss in her care.
How fit is she, literally bred to a comfortable life,
to wander free in the brush? A shepherd
before me cut off her horns, and they are still
gone. To her I am leader of the herd,
protector of the does who follow me, and although
her mouth can still endure the sharpest thorn, her spirit
I'm sure cannot.
II. What the Goat Said
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