Daniel Lassell grew up in Kentucky and lives in Bloomington, Indiana. His first poetry collection, Spit, was selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi as the winner of the 2020 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. He is also the author of Frame Inside a Frame (forthcoming, 2025) and two limited-edition poetry chapbooks, Ad Spot and The Emptying Earth.
Welcome to the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Daniel, what poems have you brought for us today?
An Account of a Llama’s Death
Zipporah died two days ago. A good llama, she watched over newborn crias. Guarded the herd at night against coyotes. She was kind even to the youngest of my siblings. Dad tied her body to the bush hog and dragged her to a pit beneath the big tree at our property’s end, the family gravesite where all our animals rest. There, he cut the engine and tussled her into the earth. My siblings and I looked upon her stiffened bulk, already losing wool. She had outlived many younger than her. We shoveled dirt to blanket her from winter, while clouds rolled on the horizon to drag a cold front in.
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Taking Care
A man in frayed overalls
lost his house to fire last week,
and now his family wades
between the couches
of friends.
Two, three children.
And yet, he has refused
my family’s help,
instead has arrived
with our neighbor
to help us.
We build a small fence
to keep our dogs in,
so they don’t go sniffing out
to where rain has made
the pond swell, where fish
blister and flap, wary-eyed,
in a basin of run-off.
Because dogs love to end
suffering with just a little more,
they would come back
wearing parched blood
and scales on their coats,
apple skins
—O that dying smell.
You could see plainly
how the fish had been
torn without reverence,
how our dogs had taken
sorrow and made it
their joy
—which on some level,
the man in overalls must be
trying to do,
parsing the earth
with each fence post,
his hands
lowering and lifting,
lowering and lifting.
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So, this poem, "Clay," is actually about my first childhood memory. When I was growing up my dad was in the military, so we moved around a little bit, and one of the places we lived was Florida. So, this one is based in Florida around 1991.
Clay
The roofer broke his neck but lived to walk again.
The paramedics gave him a proper bed
as I pushed my toy lawnmower, plastic beads bouncing,
into a fire ant hill, where I stood with bare feet
in the forming red cloud.
-----
Applause
Because fingertips sound
of loosening bones,
these palms
curve away from earth,
an encounter, a wordless signal
to describe a hunt or to praise
some ancient fire.
And the mind
remembers the past in the sound
of absence:
no banging,
no clicking,
no vowels
just nerve endings to each other
whispers of what happened.
-----
Owlet
—for Becca
From yellow ribbons of painted asphalt,
which curved river-like through darkness,
I scooped the baby owl fallen from its nest,
left for angry bumpers
drumming down the mountain into town.
How the creature was, wrapped with a towel,
with its one eye like a tired doll,
half-shut from impact, peeping for its mother.
When it hunched in a cardboard box,
the earth was in its breathing. When it fanned open
both eyes, those fiery and endless windows
through which the core of the earth looks back,
I wished with a single flap I’d gone too,
over the silent mountain into the night.
You're listening to the poems of Daniel Lassell on the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.
