I never mourned. I had to begin
and begin again, with hope,
before I could look back
at what I had done
and to whom. When I was fire
I felt my bull beneath me
in the chute. The sky was a wall
of stuck-shut windows.
I hadn’t thought in this century
it was possible to smell God—
but something in the soil
the very last time. It was there
when I let the bull bolt
from under, circle, and face me.
It was there where I bowed to him
burning—perfume.
SAM ROSS’s poems have appeared in Tin House, New Republic, Gulf Coast, and other journals. He is a 2016-2017 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
