Robert Wrigley Poems

So here is the old buck
who all winter long
had traveled with the does
and yearlings, with the fawns
...

Of the two spoiled, barn-sour geldings
we owned that year, it was Red—
skittish and prone to explode
...

As a hoodoo-voodoo, get-you-back-to-me tool,
this hank's thankless task is vast,
a head down to the ground impossibility, possibly,
...

Because I have come to the fence at night,
the horses arrive also from their ancient stable.
They let me stroke their long faces, and I note
in the light of the now-merging moon
...

Lucy Doolin, first day on the job, stroked his goatee
and informed the seven of us in his charge
his name was short for Lucifer, and that his father, a man
he never knew, had been possessed,
...

The Afterlife
1

Spring, and the first full crop of dandelions gone
to smoke, the lawn lumpish with goldfinches,
...

Under dust plush as a moth's wing,
the book's leather cover still darkly shown,
and everywhere else but this spot was sodden
...

Called out of dream by the pitch and screech,
I awoke to see my mother's hair
set free of its pincurls, springing out
into the still and hurtling air
...

Sleepy and suburban at dusk,
I learn again the yard's
geometry, edging around the garden
...

The birdhouse made from a gourd is wired
to a flanged loop of steel and screwed to the southeast post
of the shack. Two holes at the top—near where the stem was,
...