For M.R.
I imagine my grandmother as a girl, rounding up ducks
with a flick of the switch, the faulty brother who left open
the gate and the horse that trampled the brace,
feathers slick as a smear of oil. She remembered the loft.
Her father pitching up a forkful of hay, a snake in the bundle,
a writhing rope. I did not exist. I wonder if it was all
there again when she died today: The lightness of hands
after a century of work. The obedient birds,
the horses silently nosing open the gate, the sound of her
slicing the snake with the blade of her shovel.
But death was not like this—not like the rat that got the one
surviving duckling she nursed by hand, or the damp hay, or
the snake or the shovel that halved him. It was like the soft
precision of the willow switch: snapping close enough to feel
a breath, the tip just far enough away not to sting.
Mary Harpin is a poet and content marketing writer. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crab Creek Review, Juked, Terrain, Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere. She is at work on a nonfiction project with Pen Parentis about the lives of writers who are also parents.