TRUST IN MAXINE KUMIN 293my quartered cuts bark down,
open yellow-face up.Instead of fluency, as in “It ’s muslin overhead,” she bears down on her work,
stacking rough-cut lines as she must.
“Allegiance to the land is tenderness,” she says in “Hay,” “defying the chrome
millennium” by celebrating the old way of haying in her youth and now her
present, “trundling hay in my own barn.” Close as she keeps to the land, ani-
mal nature rivets her concern. The poems in Nurturespeak out for threatened
or endangered creatures: caribou, penguin, manatee, killer whale, arctic fox,
Aleutian goose, trumpeter swan.
And horses, who claim her most, even when the subject is “A Bangkok Gong.”
Kumin’s daughter has brought as a gift this “circle of hammered brass.”
When barely touched it imitates
the deep nicker the mare makes
swiveling her neck
watching the foal swim
out of her body.As Shakespeare puts it, “my nature is subdued / To what it works in, like the
dyer’s hand.” A gong’s lightest resonance sends Maxine Kumin straight to the
stable for metaphor and the unique word for a mare ’s soft neighing. Then that
familiar moment of a horse ’s “swiveling” turns up the surprise of “swim.” With
this thought, she says, you can console yourself.