BROODY

POETRY Joshua Kulseth

For Annie, eaten by foxes

Twice daily I carry her from the coop: ruffled-red, puffy Buff Orpington squatting relentlessly on her nest.

My mother says she’s broody; some instinct of breeding. Sitting all day without food, dying sometimes in their discipline, they guard

empty nests, no rooster here to bluster into fatherhood (the only egg empty, marked with an X, set to build the habit of laying).

She stakes her claim on the middle nest box alone in the dark; would slumber comfortably but for my routine plucking her plump body,

placing her on the corn pile. She gives back low grumbling clucks muffled in her plume, disheveled and annoyed, with effort moving

to water; lets on she’s learned a lesson, then once I’ve turned away, waddles quickly back inside the barn to haunt the empty nest.

I understand the impulse to brood on dead things, or whatever it might be— neither alive or dead, but only

with potential to live and die: those never-quickened impulses, germs of thought which force a mulling over,

so these sedentary days seem natural. Hunger, restlessness; do we choose what drives us, or only ride to the end

the wave of fervor, our obsessions, whatever is unhatched requiring all of us, time and stillness; a sitting discipline.