All You Need Is A Good Line

FOR SEAN SEXTON

by Shadd Piehl

All you need to do is find a good line

To start a poem, tack another one plumb

Below the first. It is a bit like art,

A bit like carpentry, bit like life,

Or a lot like, but often not enough.

So much of nature is beauty lost in

The wilderness of time and space.

Behind the house, on the sly, the beavers

Ceaselessly toil to change the course and flow

Of Crown Butte Creek, the watershed of our

Place. With that beaver-work the horses

Could not cross to winter feed and shelter.

Yesterday, I rode them bareback in a storm

Around the swollen creek, substance and form.

A fifth-generation North Dakotan, SHADD PIEHL’s poetry has appeared in the anthologies, Between Earth and Sky: Contemporary Cowboy Poets, Maverick Western Verse, Brushstrokes and Balladeers, and the magazines Aluminum Canoe, Pemmican, Red Weather, and Dry Crik Review, among others. An academic Dean for Rasmussen College, Shadd lives along Crown Butte Creek in the Heart River valley west of Mandan with his family, Marnie, Owen, Wyatt, Ryder, and horse Blue.