Tag: moose

Three Poems by David Chaudoir

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

The Anthropologist: Arrival Trope

I came to study the grief of others
and found I already spoke the language.

The notebook. The measured distance kept like a clean
wound. I wrote: the men sing when the nets come in empty.

I did not write what the singing did to me. How I stood
at the useful edge of their sorrow, making it useful.

The tropics are always sad. Even the light arrives
gold and slow, the way memory works

on a life you meant to observe. I had methods. I had a tent.
I thought: I will not be changed by this. I took very good notes.

* 

Moose

Not often seen in captivity: that enormous,
improbable head, the wide-splayed hooves,
a body so large it seems assembled from surplus parts—
built not for display but for sheer endurance
of difficult places.

Its great bulk tuned so precisely to the cold
that warmth becomes a kind of illness.
To keep one is to ask the impossible:
a sky that stays grey and biting,
an earth that thaws only halfway,
an air that carries woodsmoke
and the cold of a northern November.

I have been told I am like this.
That I require conditions no one can sustain.
That I materialize and vanish,
that I will not suffer the indignity of being known
at regular hours, in good light,
by people who mean well.

Maybe. But consider what I’m built for:
the frozen lake, the dense stand of birch,
a world that asks endurance and gets it.
Not every large thing should be kept warm.

*

Wyoming

Turn in now, brother,
lay down your name
in the sage and the silence—
let the sky take it.

Out here the dark has teeth.
The dinosaurs knew
this dark.
Stars from here to gone.

You are small.
Feel how good
that is.

Lay down with me here
where the Tetons
were still ocean.

*

David Chaudoir is a writer and anthropologist. His work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Notre Dame Magazine, El Portal, and Third Wednesday. He won the 2025 Perkoff Prize in poetry. He translates Arabic and Tajik literature and lives in Indiana.

Farewell with Potato Blight and Moose by Kathy Nelson

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Farewell with Potato Blight and Moose

I’m no good at saying goodbye.
Not to the water aerobics ladies bobbing
in that cool blue—I give a vague wave
to no one in particular, hoisting myself

up the ladder. Not to the boss
who told me he wished he had five more
like me. Not to my aunt the last time
I saw her alive. I chirped See you later

as she cried, knowing I lied. My father
grew cold on the bathroom floor,
behind the locked door,
while my fingers fumbled the rotary dial,

the ambulance already too late,
the setting sun’s angles stretching
across a blank wall.
I was seventeen. It was December.

The low winter sun is what I recall.
My mother’s last hours, the other end
of my life, I thought I’d finally
learned how to say goodbye.

I even practiced the words
in that overheated room,
where her bones were already lifting
from her flesh, and on the sill

an electric fan whirred.
I droned on just like that fan,
thanking her for all she’d done for me,
promising I would always miss her.

It wasn’t Goodbye, all those words
I said. It was I’m innocent.
Maybe the first loss, the worst,
the biggest grief of all is innocence.

Truth is, when her breath ceased,
I was a helium balloon released.
When my friend, over an untouched lunch,
whispered her news, two kinds

of cancer, the diagnoses arriving
like twins. I felt it then—
the straining for escape, the wish
for a magic trick, like Teller’s

or Houdini’s, to overcome death.
Moving west at 70, explaining
the need to be closer to family,
I pretended I’m not dying too.

Doesn’t moving always have its appeal?
My Irish ancestors fled potato blight,
their sights on milk and honey.
Who, I wonder, did they leave behind?

A heart can grow wooden with loss,
like a creaky old wind-up clock
grinding its gears, a machine, chiming
on schedule and ticking, ticking.

I knew a man once whose daughter
would no longer see him
after he told her he was dying.
She’s not angry he told me.

She loves me. She’s young.
It’s too hard to bear.
I too tried forgetting my father.
Twenty years after the day

I didn’t save him, my life by then
a small room of locked doors,
I crept back, unraveled and
empty-handed, to the cemetery.

Among the green mounds,
I scoured the headstones for his name.
Will I leave this world with nothing
and no one left to lose, or will I

leave it the way I leave one room,
arrive in the next with no idea
what I came there for? My friend,
her cancer three months in remission,

climbed a stepstool, lost her balance,
fell. Three days later, she was dead.
Is that how I’ll leave? Or like
a thirteen-pound terrier mix,

witless and resolute, churning
his short legs up a mountainside,
chasing a half-ton moose, heeding
only instinct and the body’s will?

Or will I leave the way I left
that job, regretting almost
everything, wishing for someone
to call me back, beg me to stay?

*

Kathy Nelson lives on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains. She is a James Dickey Prize winner, a finalist for the Orison Best Spiritual Literature Prize in Poetry, an MFA graduate of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, and a Nevada Arts Council grant recipient. She is author of The Ledger of Mistakes (Terrapin Books). Her work appears in About Place Journal; Atlanta Review; Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art; New Ohio Review; Pedestal Magazine; Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review; Verse Daily, and elsewhere.