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Our parents wouldn’t let us name him, so we called him

421, from the yellow tag stapled to the black fur of his left ear.

More dog than calf, he liked to lick the salt

from our skin, followed us beneath the grape arbor, 

through clover patches, back to the chicken house

where he’d tickle corn from our bare hands.

I liked him because he followed us and hated blackberries,

toothy brambles and fat berries hiding too many

seeds. And though we couldn’t name him, like the Toyota

we’d christened Pearly, the rabbit Clover, the persimmon tree

by the clothesline Sam, we sang him songs with his new name,

murmuring into his too-big eyes, the number growing

sweet and fat as he did, as the blackberries, as the corn

when it sat in water. In a few weeks he outgrew

the chicken house, moved to our neighbors’ pasture with George,

the mean old cow, who chased us if we came inside the barbed wire fence.

Six months and he was sold, the pasture only George.

The things we cannot name are splinters

working slowly out toward skin:

my blackberry stain memories of the pasture

with mean old George and piles of manure,

my brother and me leaning on the fence, stretching our hands through.



Ruth Dickey is our Poet in Residence for January. This poem originally appeared in Mud Blooms (Harbor Mountain Press, 2019).



Previously: ”San Jose, Costa Rica“, ”Seattle Winter, and “Ecola State Park".