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Dominion Over the Larger Animal

By Sophie Cabot Black b. 1958

How many times I have provided

For your death; the apple turned one way

Then the other, an arrangement made,

The softer ground. To hold your head

As if this mattered, to say what I think

Essential into your ear,

To watch the eye look everywhere to find

What it does not know it looks for.

To fasten you down in the one place

Where no one can say anything more,

Being nothing else but breath leaving,

While the man with the needle stands by

Until the signal of how it is time. To believe

I know what will happen next; to leave the hill

As the body stiffens; to pass each blossom

Of blood in the snow as if I understood

All I was capable of.

Source: Poetry (May 2011).

Biography

Raised on a small New England farm, poet Sophie Cabot Black received a BA from Marlboro College and an MFA from Columbia University. Black’s collections of poetry include The Misunderstanding of Nature (1994), which won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, and The Descent (2004), which won the Connecticut Book Award. Black’s lyrical poems are both revelatory and elusive, exploring a landscape sharpened . . .

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