“Two Encounters” by Greg Pape

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I. Buffalo Trace

Stars glitter across black pastures,
gleam and shine in the eyes of buffalo.
How many stars ride the dark dome
of a buffalo’s eye? How many
buffalo breathe the scents of grass
and river mist, starlight glinting
in the frost on their dense curled coats,
on flecks of mica riding their hooves
as they move in clans and gather
along the trace that leads to the shoals
and shallows of the crossing? Is the river
of the milky way their map? What
calls them? Why, when they come
to the two canoes by the river,
do they jump over the first where a man
sleeps, and smash the second
with their hooves until it splinters
and bloodies the fore bones of their legs?
Why do they spare him?

II. Bird in the Hand

Cold still sunlit hour, December
in the Bitterroot. The sun was about
to let the Bitterroots rise up in front of it,
the moon was rising over Kentucky,
shining on the river where the Buffalo
used to cross, easing up the east slopes
of the Sapphires. Chickadees flew
back and forth from the apple tree
to the feeder, picking up sunflower seeds.
One flitted across my head twice,
thanking me, maybe, for filling the feeder.
Up in the bare branches the birds
picked open the seeds. One chickadee
was looking at me. I made my chickadee
sound, took a handful of seeds from the bucket
and held out my open palm flat and still.
The bird landed on my middle fingertips.

I felt the delicate cleaving of its small
clawed feet. It looked into my eyes,
hopped into my palm and took a single seed
then flew back to a branch in the apple tree.
Ah, Chickadee, now that was something.

–Greg Pape,
Animal Time
Accents Publishing

Greg Pape

Greg Pape is the author of nine books, including Border Crossings, Black Branches, Storm Pattern (University of Pittsburgh Press), Sunflower Facing the Sun, winner of the Edwin Ford Piper Prize (University of Iowa Press), and American Flamingo, winner of a Crab Orchard Open Competition Award (Southern Illinois University Press). His poems have been published widely in such magazines and literary reviews as The Atlantic, Iowa Review, The New Yorker, Northwest Review, and Poetry. He has received the Discovery/The Nation Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowships, the Pushcart Prize, the Richard Hugo Memorial Poetry Award, and his poems have been featured on NPR and read by Garrison Keillor on The Writers’ Almanac. He teaches at the University of Montana, and in the Brief-residency MFA program at Spalding University. Greg served as Poet Laureate of Montana from 2007 to 2009.

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