Athena Kildegaard
The Mole
On the driveway
between wetland and wetland
we found a mole, frozen,
perfect, as if it had stopped
dead in its track.
How hideous a creature
with its fleshy tentacled nose
and no face to attract
sympathy, and four
taloned feet with
scaly skin the color
of gums or tongue, something
exposed and unruly,
and yet its tail
was handsome, with long
hairs along its short length,
loam-hued and distinct,
and I took the small
beast by its tail
and moved it
out of the driveway
and onto the snowy
shoulder so that we
would not drive over it
and someone might
come along and praise
it into a simple meal.
Animal Nature
In the night, we'd risen
to kill two bats who circled
in a witchy delirium and could not
be persuaded to fly out
the door. Long after dawn
we woke spoon-wise
and unsteady. You moved
my hand onto your cock.
An oriole in the poplar
near the window sang us
through frenzy. We swallowed
one another and fell apart,
languid and bedazed, onto
the cotton coverlet, and only later
did we settle the bats' dumb bodies
into the dappled sunlight.
Athena Kildegaard’s sixth book of poetry, Prairie Midden, is just out from Tinderbox Editions. Her poetry has recently appeared in, or is forthcoming in, Colorado Review, Ecotone, North American Review, Interim, The American Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Minnesota Morris.
