The sheep fell hard, as though she dropped a long way down.
He strung her up by her feet on the fence and commenced sawing with a buck knife, to expose the entrails that shined like a bag of amber marbles.
These he tore out and threw into a bucket, before pinching off the bladder and spilling it by the fence, where steam rose from a patch of crusted snow.
You can throw up if you want to, he said, and, because I’d been given no job but to carry a pail, I understood this to be a kind of test.
A test to let him know what kind of daughter I would be: dogged, like a coyote, or meek, like the sheep, when, later, we would lace the carcass with poison to find out how much was needed to leave half the coyotes dead.
(Another test, the LD50: LD for lethal dose.)
More sheep-daughter than dog-daughter, I did not think about the coyotes who paced along the chain-link of their cages or about the barn owls who lived tethered to their boxes in a field of wild asparagus.
Instead of thinking I was making sure I didn’t throw up and didn’t faint, even though the insides of the sheep were hotter than I expected and smelled more sweet.
THE CHAMBER
As does the poem by William Blake, this involves a poison worm,
a worm that would make the blackbird who ate it
flap and squawk in distress
while at regular intervals I played a tape of a bird
also squawking in distress, so you see
there was this salt-box-girl regression going on
while I took notes: Now the bird is squawking in distress,
my job being to watch on closed-circuit tv
and record the bird’s death, were that to occur
in the chamber made from a gutted fridge
rigged up to a button in the next room
where, when I pushed, I’d hear a musical plink
over the loudspeaker as a mealworm dropped
from a crown of vials that sat on the chamber,
the crown rotating as the glass vials tipped,
one worm per plink, though I sometimes plinked twice
if the worm got stuck
or if the bird failed to squawk
in that tiny brick building that rustled with wings
from birds scritching in cages
I’d been filling for weeks,
my truck full of traps I set on fence posts at dawn,
when the redwings clung
to tall blades in the ditches
and sang shuck-shreeek as the dirt road fumed
behind me in the mirrors, while ahead bore a rising
red-winged sun that I drove into
feeling immortal,
how could I not feel immortal
when I was mistress of the poison worm?
SUPER 8
There were so many black birds I could not count,
homing on this patch of dusk. My boss’s idea
had been to spray them with spangles
so that, if found, the finder would know
the bird had stopped here at this cornfield
behind the Super 8 motel. That is,
if he could imagine the helicopter
with its tank of glue and light.
Otherwise, he might just wonder at a spangled bird.
We untangled them from the mist nets
and brought them into the bathroom’s white-tile grid
thirty feet east of the blacktop stripe,
where I counted the spangles, a soldier
in the tribe of useless data. Afterward
I walked them back outside two at a time
and opened my fists, where the birds paused
just long enough to leave their own data on my palms.
Here’s what we think of
your spangles, your starlight. Then the night flushed
them up into its swoon — however faintly,
the corn glittered as the birds resumed their ravening.
IN VITRO/ IN VIVO
Only once did the frog come to mind: when the coroner
came to “first-aid training” at the fire station,
his slide carousel set up to eliminate
the easy pukers. The frog was not dead
but its brain had been pithed, which is what happens
when you stick a probe into the skull and wiggle.
You wind up with something dead enough
to let you stretch its tongue as thin and wide
as a cellophane sheet, which I did so
eagerly, back in the lab. The coroner said:
Here is the fat guy whose Chihuahua
gnawed through his stomach. Click.
Here is the farmer who hanged himself in his silo.
(I noted his foreshortened dangling feet.) Click.
It had been thrilling to see the frog’s blood cells
jerking through the narrow capillaries. Here
is the woman who swallowed the bottle of Drāno.
Click. Here is the man who just Sawzall-ed
his neck clean through. Click. Here is the guy
who shot off his head, but wait: he’s still living,
which is what happens if the brain stem’s left intact.
Click. The coroner said we should aim for the base
not the top of the skull and remember to turn down
the heat. Click. There are many people in this world
on whom nobody checks in very often. Click.
The warmer the room, the quicker a body
will turn black and bloat. Click.
If you have a dog it is important to leave out
what seems like an inordinate amount of dog food.
Click, click, then there was nothing
but a slab of light to signal he was through.
And it was then that I remembered the frog,
not that the coroner had spoken of frogs.
What he said was,
If we saw the cops outside, smoking cigars,
that’s when we’d know we had a stinker.
SIMILAR GIRL
Most of the hospital’s emergencies lay
on gurneys that made a chickadee noise—
eent eent eent—as they rolled on rubber wheels.
But the girl with the bellyache just walked in
clinging tight to her purse, protecting the pain,
as if she feared its being kicked.
Meanwhile an old woman whimpered in the next room
help me, god help me—here’s the main thing I learned:
if trouble comes with an odor,
everyone scrams. That’s how it was in the ER
where I ghosted the halls, for the red appliqué
the college ambulance corps wore on its sleeve—
I would rescue the beauties
who jumped off the campus walkway bridge
and lay on the pavement like old flowers pressed in books.
In the kitchenette lounge, one surly doc asked:
So who’s going to tell her she’s knocked up?
— cut to the girl who’d been waiting for hours
lit by a long bulb flickering out.
As for the doctors, well it would be easy
to harp on their chuckling, or sneer at the gum
they snapped with the vampire prongs of their teeth
or the way they used cold half-cups of coffee
to drown their cigarettes. But it was they
who called me to press on the man
whose heart had run through the course of its years,
millions of spasms in the box of his ribs—
later, on my doughnut napkin
I would calculate: a quarter billion.