I approached them swiftly
across an featureless plain,
effortlessly aloft like a hawk
scouring the prairie for prey
among the wind-swept grass,
my shadow a flicker of dark
racing across the emptiness
like a panicked hare.

They are black-mossed hills
from afar, a mirage
of light and speed and height
that resolves into a truth
as the distance narrows:
a herd at ease, monstrous
heads craned low as they graze
in ruminant silence,

waiting for the summons
to resume the slow circuit
of their migratory lives.
They will move again when
the skies tell them they must,
nosing their braying calves
in front of them and raising
a billowing canopy of dust.

But not just yet.   Lifting
their necks and shaking them
as though roused from sleep,
the buffalo sing, their voices
worn soft from northern winter
and poignant with the ache
of their unknown purpose,
the grief of empty spaces.

Even the weather – crisp, the sky
rinsed clean by overnight rain –
cannot dispel the depressing

fact of another person’s junk
splayed, naked and obscene,
on the chaste well-trimmed lawn.

A pair of unmatched bookends –
a chimpanzee, paw on chin,
adrift in clichéd thought,

a rearing stallion with its sex
smudged to a euphemism –
embrace a decade’s worth

of National Geographics
untouched except by mildew’s
wavering, tainted hand.

Nothing surprises or edifies.
I know this life.  I live it.
A mistake:  I turn to go

and glimpse, among   
the dented double boilers
and golf shirts leached to beige,

a small bronze Buddha
scrubbed bright as a smiling sun
and plump with a thousand lies.

More from Joe Barnes on the next page.