"Old Woman With a Goiter"

Click here to listen to Erica Levy McAlpine read this poem.


Just as in a field a herd of cows
will lean and clang their copper cauldrons
like the rain, with dawn breaking pink
upon their bangles, and stand there blotched,
humbled and hindered by their own sound,
and crumple their knees, dumbstruck,
while every jerk of their backs and involuntary
gesture registers the ringing of a bell,
so this old woman stood behind a mountain
spruce, struck by something in the field,
a row of phlox or patch of bluebell,
holding her spray of yellow gentians,
while that great ball shifted on her neck,
ripe as a stitch of loganberry.

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