292 PART THREE
terrible. He paweth in the valley... and he smelleth the battle afar off.” For her
and the Bible both, a poet ’s touch makes the encounter genuine: “fear-snorts,”
“crow hop,” then the surprises of “skid,” “level,” “asking.”
To Make a Prairie (Emily Dickinson’s phrase), her book on poetry and coun-
try living, describes riding an eleven-month-pregnant mare she ’s fitted with
a gauze ear-bonnet against black flies. After giving birth the mare rejects her
foal, and Kumin recalls her own cracked bleeding nipples years before. Four
days of bottle-feeding follow, then weaning to a formula of gruel to be mashed
and stirred at two in the morning. Thirteen years later, now a prize-winning
trail horse, it ’s this mare the poet attends to, sleeping “in the blackness of the
barn.”
Another poet comes to mind, practicing and writing animal husbandry. Off
a narrow lane in Devon, Ted Hughes fumbles a cow’s teat into her struggling
calf ’s mouth, “Stuffing its slippery muscle into his suction.” When a lamb
strangles during birth, Hughes has to cut off the head and then help the ewe,
“timing my effort / To her birth push groans.” His Anglo-Saxon word hoard
works more strenuously, but Kumin’s working voice, no less strong and sure,
gives the lie to any gender clichés.
“Splitting Wood at Six Above”:
I open a tree.
In the stupefying cold
—ice on bare flesh a scald—
I seat the metal wedge
with a few left-handed swipes,
then with a change of grips
lean into the eight-pound sledge.
Her rhymes come rough and ready—“cold... scald,” “swipes... grips,”
“wedge... sledge”—like her hardy lines. The next section, figuring weather
and wood as a householder might, takes our breath away.
It ’s muslin overhead.
Snow falls as heavy as salt.
You are four months dead.
The beech log comes apart
like a chocolate nougat.She means her dearest friend Anne Sexton, a fierce poet who like Hughes’s wife
Sylvia Plath took her own life by gas. Kumin’s closing lines stretch their sinews
across a tough syntax of emotion.
It is the sound
of your going I drive
into heartwood. I stack