Mucking Out

Horse stalls, pig sties and the cow pen
are finally clean after the neglect
that came with haying
and the onslaught of winter.

Thirty shovels fill a three foot long,
two foot deep, steel bin hung on a track
from a ceiling beam; a train pulled by me,
spilling straw and manure, load after load,
in and out to the dung heap.

The yard, steaming in the cold
is packed with freezing, waist high muck ranges
up which I drag the ton heavy bin,
struggling to find a low enough spot to dump it.

The wheels derail from the effort,
cast-iron arms crack me in the skull,
I stumble dazed in sub-zero disgust on my knees
down fecal ranges trying not to pass out,
not quite but almost ready to curse God and die,
venting my spleen instead onto the ice-hard
ooze pool.

I stagger back up and curse the derailed bin
back onto the track and back into the barn
while the mare studies me from her stall.

A cow along the bin path, belligerent at being disturbed,
kicks up its hooves, missing my face,
crashing into a lowing relation lying
in front of the gates over which
I must negotiate passage,
triggering another barrage of my spleen.

Only the boar's sty remains: Rudy.
Rudy likes me - some days; other days
he gnaws at the shaft of the shovel,
bloodshot eyeing me, tusks like nicotine.

Today, affectionate to neither me
nor to his mate of the week, I have to buy him off
with extra feed, and muck out only what he lets me,
my anger checked; his, in danger of venting.

Alone again outside on the settling mass,
the last load upturned, cold wind and
escarpment clouds compose dusk from the blue.

Purged of loathing, my breath falls like snow
on the pungent peaks at my feet.

I imagined villages nestled along the manure ridges,
tiny people who watch the coming of the night,
the snow of my breath falling among them.