Poet's Choice

language gallop -- so sense,

though not yet his, may be

conveyed. Heartbeats like hooves. I whisper, "Listen!

symphonic we're waiting for you."

The associations of horsemanship and hammering express both wonder and anxiety.

In myth, a hero is a totem animal -- bull or dragon or bear -- and resembles or becomes that animal. So Jay Parini, remembering his mother's storm-dark stories about crows, associates her power with the storm, and with those dark, powerful birds:

THE CROW-MOTHER TELLS ALL

The empty oil drums rattled in the yard

that day in Scranton, and the ham-red hills

would shudder in the distance, thunder-chilled.

My mother shucked a dozen ears of corn,

feeding me stories of the swoop and killings

I could say by heart and still can say.