I read on the big red and black Honda before

firing it up inside right next to the propane stove

because it is fall and the birds know it and wing

away just as the lizards in the woodpile know

and slow their scuttling while the walnut

knows and in the strange way of the world

seals off of its own leaves to die by draining

from them the blood of the sun and the apple

trees know and unburden themselves and I am

turning their year’s work into butter because

little in the world strikes me as holy wealth so much

as food jarred in clean glass which I am lucky

to find in a year where the whole unlucky nation

has turned to canning like the metaphor it is –

a year I spent mostly watching the wind

which churns now in the forest calving

limbs from trees to lay across the road

which will necessitate the use of another tool

that could at any moment lead me to dusty

death, that old unreliable chainsaw, toothy

as a beartrap with its orange warning sticker

of an arm shorn of its hand though wouldn’t

it be handy if the world itself came with

a warning telling us what is safe what

dangerous, crisp clear as one sweet apple

and one tart which is how you make the butter

best worth saving, sealed tight with a bright pting

that means tomorrow and perhaps tomorrow.

Perhaps if I’ve learned one thing, it’s that

the world begins and ends with winter. Perhaps

if there’s one small thing I can help keep

alive, it’s these chickadees flashing

in the barred light between the big fir’s

old branches, bowed into shapelessness

by wind, snow, time. The Bohemian

Waxwings came for a day, found no berries,

flocked as one into vanishment. Ravens

ride the storms, black boats with slow

black oars. In the middle of the day

an ermine lithe as a snake leaps across

the yard, leaving the full print of its form

in the snow, divot and tail, divot and tail,

then dives, disappears, until the head

rises like a submarine’s periscope.

Individual flakes gleam bright as mica

in the cold. I think of the mouse moving

low in the layers, how the ermine finds him

and tears him apart there in that invisible

subnivean universe, how bright his unseen

blood. What will I say when you ask me

if what I have done is my life? The fox’s faint

tracks dent the fractal shards of sky.

The chickadees shiver themselves alive.

The fat dumpster ravens croak,

shuffle in their scarabesque armor,

leave trident tracks in the fresh

snow linked by the wispy gully

where the long middle talon

drags. They show no fear, black eyes

following me, noting, I suppose,

the shape and contour of my face

beneath my wool hat, should I

prove harmful, somehow, should I

give them a reason to remember.

Never cross a corvid, they say,

and I’ve read how they recall our faces

for years, may pass their recognition

on to the chicks, tender seeds

of grievance clacking between coaly beaks.

In one study, researchers wore masks

of cavemen and Dick Cheney when

they captured the birds. Later, they

were scolded, followed, harangued:

recollected. Wise, I’d say, to hide their true

faces. One cocks his glossy head at me,

as if considering: How long to preen

this frost from the morning wing?

How much cold carrion? What glitter-joy

in the garbage? Who wrongs his kind,

and how best requite the grudge?

How terribly beautiful a name for the men who skulked the prairie

seeking the last of the bison bones scattered by ghosts

and coyotes to send to eastern fertilizer plants, the tall

fin-like dorsal process bones

that held up the great muscled mound

of head, the heads themselves ground to grow hydrangeas.

I’m on page 34 of Win Blevins’ Dictionary of the American West,

which begins with bois de vache, or buffalo chips,

wood of the cow, used to kindle fire

in the wide arid west, before it was dry, too, of the buffalo.

It includes bolo tie: “one of the small

sartorial indulgences of the western male”

and bologna bull next to bonanza, a nice symmetry

there, and ends with “books won’t freeze,” a phrase

used to comfort cattleman, reminder that the herd

is bought on the numbers in the ledger and not

the beeves frozen to tented hide on the prairie’s bare plate.

I shut the book. Outside, the evening is saying things I miss.

The aspens flick their gold fingerprints

to the soil, done shivering with speech

till spring, though below ground they whisper

and rise, below ground they are one animal.

A few pages back, under “A,” Blevins recounts the Ute’s aspen tale

that I knew first from the man who hauled the poles

of his teepee behind his truck like long bones. It’s the story

about the time the creator paid a special trip to earth

on a full moon, and all the living things trembled to show their awe,

trembled in homage, except the proud aspen,

who now, we know in recompense, quakes

whenever looked upon. This man tried also

to teach me a few Plains signs – like small bounding animal

looks out at you from safety. Like, we eat well tonight.

Like, moose. Or how the symbol for snake

looks a lot like the one for weaver, especially

from the distance at which one shouts with one's hands

at one's enemy, or friend, which is what one is trying to determine

while keeping, if possible, from trembling in the tall grass and making

large self-identifying gestures.