I step outside right at sunrise when night creatures are still on the move. It’s a threshold hour, a groundhog slogs under the fence or a fawn startles, his mouth full of orange lilies. No one expects to see me, especially my neighbor’s unneutered billy goat who is standing on my gravel path. Of course I want to pet him so I miss something; the hardness of his horizontal gaze. He is challenging me.

I consider myself a country woman, having stepped on a blacksnake once in my darkened living room. I shoo bears from my feeder, spare every insect I can from harm. I know that if you throw a tarp over your mower and return a week later, beware; something will be living under it. I haul crap that weighs as much as I do to the junkyard in an old Ford Ranger and leave my chimney uncapped so the swifts who raise a brood there yearly can return to their home. On winter evenings I study the night sky as my father did, on his deck wheezing after industry destroyed his lungs. Canis, he’d say. Orion.

I believe my dad felt close to God when he was among stars and his fruit trees, fat cabbages under an arm as he huffed around his garden. I know that he knew how to grow food in any soil and how to survive by farming the side of a mountain. Animals primarily had utilitarian value; mules plowed, cows milked. Later in life there was a beloved dog he spoiled but for most of our shared years he offered cautionary advice on nature: all the hippies thought they would go out and live happily ever after with the rabbits and the birds but that’s not how the world works. He’d spray his peach tree and puzzle when I cringed. Was the world holy? Sure, but it had to be subdued.

The goat plots. He doesn’t like me stroking his head and gives a couple horn tosses in my direction. Ouch. I decide to go back inside and he prances right up the steps so I can’t open the door. I give his head a gentle push to move him and that is like ringing the boxing bell. It is on. He gores me twice in the thigh, ripping my jeans, scratches my hand, and gets me again in the hip as I flee. He chases me to my car and once I’m inside stares enigmatically until he gets bored. My neighbor says his names is Ares. Of course it is, of course. Little son-of-a-Zeus.

All I can think of approaching Father’s Day is how much my dad would have loved the story of my getting beat to hell by a goat. Were he still living, he would throw off any embrace offered him, but he’d laugh and give advice on how goats work, and somewhere in that, how the world itself works. And somewhere deeper, there’d be a nugget of know-how that might just save me some bruises and a pair of jeans down the road.

Inheriting My Father’s Watch

It’s stopped at two minutes after twelve,
the portal you exit through
carried home in my mother’s lap.

Not to make it grander than it is,
feign craftsmanship, or declare the elegant
sweep of a minute-hand,

yours being an engine of quartz
and electrical charges, stainless steel band
of a man who comes home each night.

You tell me to eye its ticking during flights
to settle a dizzy stomach,
that the rotor winds a mainspring,

depends on the swing of arm and wrist.
I want to wake it up,
that movement, to find in the rewinding,

questions time itself might ask such as
when were you happiest?
Or twisting off case and crystal,

unseal a bezel to listen for the lifting
of you, beyond its calibre
clock-beat, to cloud, then blue.

Sharon Ackerman’s poems have been published in the Southern Humanities Review, Atlanta Review, Still: The Journal, Appalachian Places, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and many others. She has one poetry collection, Revised Light (Main Street Rag Publishers, 2021), and a second in the works. She is poetry editor for Streetlight Magazine.

Sharon Ackerman’s poems have been published in the Southern Humanities Review, Atlanta Review, Still: The Journal, Appalachian Places, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and many others. She has one poetry collection Revised Light (Main Street Rag Publishers, 2021) and a second in the works. She is poetry editor for Streetlight Magazine.