Allure

“A domesticated cow [French Limousine]
has been found living among a herd
of gigantic bison in a Polish forest.”
       — Ornithologist Adam Zbyryt

Maybe what first caught her eye
were the elegant black noses, sculpted,
with the oiled sheen of crow feathers
so unlike the pale, flat ones of her herd
whose insipid brownness filled her days.

Or perhaps, it was the way they stood
silently at the edge of the field, watching,
their stoic eyes shining like berries tucked into fur.
Maybe it was their ancient forms—muscular, dark—
or the beautiful upward curve of their horns.

It could have been the way they kicked away
the wolves at the edge of the primeval forest.
Maybe it was musk. Or the curly coats
or the shaggy beards their proud heads tossed
as they turned to go. No one knows, but something

urged her to follow the mystery that stirred
and called, leave the old familiars to chew
blandness, to blink their stolid, long-lashed eyes
as they watched her walk away
and not look back.

*

Clela Reed is the author of seven collections of poetry. The most recent, Silk (Evening Street Press, 2019), won the Helen Kay Chapbook Prize and then a 2020 Georgia Author of the Year award. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has had poems published in The Cortland Review, Southern Poetry Review, The Atlanta Review, Valparaiso Review, The Literati Review, Clapboard House, Red Door, and many others. A former English teacher and Peace Corps volunteer, when not traveling or chasing deer from her garden, she lives and writes with her husband in their woodland home near Athens, Georgia.