THE GEOGRAPHIC CENTER Maxine Kumin p. 1992 ============================= In they come, the Harpy-like great flappers, a pair of pileated woodpeckers. Like us, a faithful couple. The male announces their arrival daily at 3 with his harsh crow-call across the ash treetops. They stay an hour or so to peck apart the strangle-vines of bittersweet we say we'll thin someday to save the tree. Word has been bruited around the county we put out 50 lbs. of birdseed weekly, five of suet, sundry crusts and crumbs. It's January. Two feet of snow protect the straitened ground. Deer have leapt my garden fence and eaten clean the row of Brussels sprouts that drooped there, armless sentries. A mild one-lane flow of creatures, mostly coyotes, let us know they're foraging all night, nose to the wild turkey tracks that skitter around the frozen pond's perimeter. Today my chestnut horse stands on the geographic center of the pond. He was born here, seven winters must have taught him that it's water under, but instinct isn't everything. Last summer he came in as if bee-stung galloping from pasture to the barn with a muzzle full of quills. Why would a horse, you ask me, poke a procupine, out of bravado or foolishness? In World War II, basic training, Alabama, all July you carried a 50-lb. pack however many sweaty miles they marched you daily --and why did you enlist?-- before the Harvard clique of physicists found and shipped you with sealed orders to Los Alamos, another of the soldier- scientists who worshiped Oppenheimer. Our generation packed its 50 lbs. from Hiroshima to the Pentagon, from Selma, Memphis, the seedy back way out of a hotel dining room in L.A., and most vivdly, the gorgeous riderless horse in full regalia that we carry forward prancing, stopping, its stirrups turned backward bearing the empty Presidential boots. We shoulder what this life has lots of, prisoners of hope as set in our own ways as the woodpeckers whose bright red crests and red moustaches glint against the flourishing bittersweet we say we should but never will rip out. ======== ** contributory thanks to Sam Droege ** ======== ========