SHEEP

Chios, Greece

The hawks shrill,

counting themselves cry by cry.

The fox noses the wind

for freshness. But this flock has

no past and no math.

They have no yesterday

and no approaching nightfall.

             They endure

in a land of no named planet.

The thyme and the wiry mastic

tremble with their passage from one

unthinking hour cropping

grass to the next

sky turned green. This is not

the daylight of the dog with his command.

This is not the wing’s gift of angling

into an updraft. Not one of them wonders

or recalls a single name,

and this shoulder-to-rump slow coursing

of unthinking closeness is their

freedom from resembling thistles and weed,

flint and tussock. They are the field

breathing. They do not know.

They do not remember, and possess

no future, like vegetation weary

of solitude stirring as one,

huddled and quick to close

around the startled hunger of the lamb.

GOATS CLEARING BRUSH

Slender legs and long, hanging ears and a way of eating

without looking down, alert, the entire

nation of them, gazing hard with those blind but seeing

keyhole pupils, hedged

from the road and the cliff

by a hashtag fence just enough

barrier to make them wander only

where there is need.

They clear danger,

strip the canyon

of future wildfire and by nightfall some power

has herded them

back to where they sleep. But who brings them,

who trucks them away? Is it true they feed entirely on

brambles and poison oak? And thrive

on dry pinprick rye and

thistles that stand in bristling riot?

Is it true they are afraid of nothing, stepping with clip,

clip quiet with hooves the same metal as their horns?

I speak to them but they do not look. They have their work.