Jenny George
I was moving the herd from the lower pasture
to the loading pen up by the road.
It was cold and their mouths steamed like torn bread.
The gate swung on its wheel, knocking at the herd
as they pushed through. They stomped
and pocked the freezing mud with their hooves.
This was January. I faced backward into the hard year.
The herd faced forward as the herd always does,
muscling through the lit pane of winter air.

It could have been any gate, any moment when things go
one way and not the other—an act of tenderness
or a small, cruel thing done with a pocketknife.
A child being born. Or the way we move
from sleeping to dreams, as a river flows uneasy under ice.

Of course, nothing can ever be returned to exactly.
In the pen the herd nosed the fence and I forked them hay.
A few dry snowflakes swirled the air. The truck would be there
in an hour. Hey, good girl. Go on. Get on, girl.
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David Berman at microphone
David Berman of Silver Jews Remembered

"[Berman] was a protégé of the poet James Tate, with whom he’d studied in graduate school: the two influenced each other to the point that Tate named a poem in his last book after a line from a Berman song."

viaNEW YORK REVIEW DAILY
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"When I first encountered the poem several years ago, what stood out first to me was that an Asian poet was writing a contemporaneous poem about a defining tragedy of modern American history. 'In Memoriam' documents the intersectionality of grief. It determines the distance between marginalized perspectives, between elation and devastation, as no greater than an enjambed line. Consider the resonances between the poem and the slain minister’s final speech"
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