Kate Benedict Poetry

In snug clapboard houses, they burn wood for heat.
The chopping of the wood, the piling and hauling, makes them hardy.
They rake and hay, they plant and pick, they put on muscle.
Their poems have muscle too; they are hard-hewn.

In their poems, there are rocks. Rockhood matters.
There are horses, their drawn faces, their quick hooves.
There is an utterance of water, a brook or the ocean.
There is a barn and inside it: a weird, peering owl.

Animals, animals, some of them lost to us.
Killed by a Boston car or another animal.
Moles, voles, coons, hares,
woodchucks, the innocent frog.

They chant the genus of each tree in their locality.
They know each bird by its singular cry.
In their familiar wood they stop and listen.
That's rapture, grist for a rugged rhyme.

They pound it out on an old black typewriter,
the words faint for ribbons are hard to come by.
Hard to come by, the solitude that was their element,
and the fox squirrel, the extravagant wood.

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