Classic Poem

One frame, that's all there is —
and not on film. It went
stark into the heart's
darkroom and hypo: shutter speed,
circa 40 mph;
lens, a car window; lo-
cation, a curved road (cars
coming up behind us); subject,
a cow moose the color of iron-
rust, a stone's throw away
profiled, head-up, in a live
diorama of primeval bog-
wallow, balsam and fir, the drab
mass of her at a slant
like a ship's figurehead . . . .

Tall as a church folks
would say once. They could allow
cathedral this time — the grotesque
head like a great gargoyle
at the summit of the thing — except
no mischief's in it — nothing
but the homely truth . . . . Yes.

Such as a Giantess, half
mountain and half cone forest,
looming out of a last ebb
of the Pleistocene — motionless,
rigid, as if fixed or transfixed
by some one thought like God's
I Am That I Am
back then
when He'd just made the world
and there were no roads in it.