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The Salmon's Milkmaid MAG
Priscilla McDonnell leapt from her window
with her life in her handkerchief,
past birdpainted trees
and the windblown grass.
She landed, sank ankledeep, dank
in hedgehog hewn
and fertile furrows,
and stepped tiptoe
fast from the farm.
Down through the wilderness
with the wolverine beds.
Down through the forest
with its stiff nettled past.
Down to the stream
with its brokenstone babble
and moonlit moss sheen.
Scraping a cap of wet leather leaves
from a glistening cool rock,
Priscilla McDonnell sat to wait
with hands and handkerchief
folded in her lap.
Hours harkened past fast
while the darkened cloudlined
sky flowed by.
Priscilla patiently waited complaisant
as the time for her perennial
spring joy drew near.
For once a year's waited,
a night's simply bided.
And at onethirty,
she spread her handkerchief
and unscrewed the lid of a mason jar.
She spattered a batter of soft buttermilk
and sprinkled fine salt
over a foam frothed eddy.
The buttermilk drooled in a pool,
covering the cool water.
And a sealicked salmon,
tricked by the scent of salt,
flopped on the bank and stopped.
The calicoclad Priscilla stooped kneeling
by the sleek fish and sang it sweetly
the song of her sisters.
A moonbeam gleamed
in the bleak black of his eye,
and his scales stretched tense
as his stickyslick body taut grew.
Soon the salmon was the size of a rosebush,
soon after he looked six feet six.
Buttermilk-made fish and
bitter milkmaid bride,
dance in the starlight
with the passion of the tide;
twirl with the world's stern stride,
and bloat with bliss at a fishlipped kiss.
The dawn doomed salmon
swung his cool maiden.
faster and faster in a fisheyed frenzy
as the sky gentle brightened.
And the virgin milkmaid spun madly,
spanked by the finflanked beast
till the pale sky whitened
in the east, till the far cock crew.
The shrivelling salmon limpened
and splashed wilted in the water, floating.
His dawncolored belling reflecting the slimy sky;
his oily cold eyes jelled hard
into obsidian pearls.
Across the fields of the wavering dawn
with clouds cracked like arctic icefloes,
across the cool crystal
of the timothy's timid dew jewels,
Priscilla McDonnell wisped home
through corduroy grasses.
She needs not sneak to bed,
for the morning's chores need tender tending.
She walks not to the kitchen,
nor the rickety henhouse,
but to the sweet steaming barn
to the milkcow's stall.
The milkmaid halts,
not fetching the clanging zinc bucket.
Not hiding her handkerchief
under the soft hay.
But she kneels next
to the milkcow's calf
to cry.
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