Tarlton Law Library
Jamail Center for Legal Research

Night Storm

An ocean of wind 
breaks onto the night 
rolls through my dreams
bends my limbs toward you
on your way out the door 
to witness     to warn 
the unspeakable roar
the threat in the dark 
under a moon blown
lost somewhere behind
the night that was ours.

The Buffalo

  - "Snow Paralyzes Buffalo As Winter Arrives Late"
       - The Washington Post, December 28, 2001

He must have known years of snow, 
flakes slanting as if thrown like stones 
into his ageless eyes, onto his brow, 
his matted beard.  This time, perhaps 
he'd got his hopes up, perhaps he'd been misled, 
the way the crocus and the daffodil 
miscalculate an early spring.

The wind-blown snow picks up 
and the cold's a creeping vise upon his bones. 
He hunches on a rise to watch the vast 
and quiet grassland and knows he's ranged 
too far from granite clefts or Dakota 
cottonwoods.  He's patient as a nickel 
lying worn on a long loblolly bar. 
Sixty million gone:  their tongues to the hungry
and unspeakable; their scrotums laced 
as pouches holding dice carved from their bones; 
hides for saddles, stirrups, lariats; 
beards for mittens; blood for paint. 

How could he miss the threat in the closing 
low gray sky?  Had he run out of steps? 
Perhaps his blunt, directed mind recalled
some warmth, some joy in the gallop of the herd, 
that great black carpet, the undulating plain.

His hooves dig in, like an aging 
batter in a frigid twilight game
fighting off the brush?back pitch 
in the paralyzing snow, still as Lincoln's
chilled white marble gazing down the long
and frozen Mall in a deep mid-winter storm.

Greg McBride is now retired from his position as Deputy Chief Counsel of the Federal Transit Administration, at the U.S. Department of Transportation. He is a 1967 graduate of Princeton University and received his law degree from Georgetown University. He is a former wrestler, and served as an Army photographer in the Vietnam War. In 2003 he was Jenny McKean Moore Fellow in Poetry at George Washington University. His essays and poems have appeared in Aethlon, Baltimore Review, The Gettysburg Review, Minimus, Poet Lore, Potomac Review, and WordWrights. His poems also appear in A Common Bond: Poetry and Prose by American and Vietnamese Veterans of the Vietnam War (Memorial Day Writers' Project, 2002) and Cabin Fever: Poets at Joaquin Miller's Cabin, 1984-2001 (Word Works, 2003)