What wild duns watch me walk to them in the rain today?
Two cast out from the band stand awake and alive in the rain today.
I speak to them, they watch me back, away, away.
I want to own the duns, to cut a piece out of their painting,
hold it to the light in my house. They fight to hold themselves in their painting,
wild, they don’t know their naming.
I take them away in my mind, the quiet duns in the rain.
Their heads go up, their heads go down, they turn around, two duns in the rain.
They give me their faces, then their dark ends—again, again.
***
Barbara Laiolo-March’s poetry and interviews have appeared in Dispatches From the Poetry Wars, The Missing Slate, Concis Journal, Occupoetry, Yemassee, Berkeley Poetry Review, Orion, Denver Quarterly and other journals and anthologies. She is a co-founder of the Surprise Valley Writers’ Conference and works with farmers and ranchers in the rural West. She lives in Cedarville, California.
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