I.
When to ask their forebear:
Were thieves present
only to lick at your wounds?
Will they rummage
our pockets, wear our killing
dresses? Because
you, Romulus, would eat
your brother’s eyes
for a ruby and for a crow,
will we?—Sleeping,
the collar is undone and kept
far from the mouth.
It is Easter, 1967.
Miniature
are the ways we keep from teething.
Sometimes, it is to imagine
each swan,
perfectly curved. Sometimes
we scold
the shadow for bidding
against the hand.
IV.
The windfall brings
your progeny, brings
the frayed rope left behind
by a stevedore, chewed through
by his part wolf.
What we keep to our pockets
is, itself, a story. At dinner,
it is thumbed,
away from the eyes. On the train,
it is set first in Alaska, set
again in Baltimore. It is what we hate
most in ourselves.
I will never be much good
to the gold miners. I will never
save a part wolf. I can,
but should never, own a knife.
The train’s bathroom leaks
our stories to the track. The bridge-
water glows and, somewhere,
a beekeeper glows also, knowing,
to the day,
when his flock will die. He leaves them
a lantern
as apology.
VIII.
The pretty girl cleans in her sluice.
The cripple wears
his Halloween mask. How else
might we be undone by this book?
East of Eden
is Winterhaven, Florida, a boxcar
full of tinsel. Who would
bathe in tinsel over orient dew
but the cripple and the pretty girl?
Where else but here? Until
suddenly, the stonemason delivers on
his angel. The gymnast
does not retard her legs.
The piccolo!
The virgin calf!
We are okay learning everything
again. The baroque! The art
of carving its haunches!
We play children’s games
on the beach,
in the cavity on the beach.