A Son of Wishes
A son my mother wants, any baby,
she would say, I’ll take any
baby you’ve got as long as it’s a boy
baby, man baby, sweet-eyed
baby don’t get me wrong,
this bosom longing,
this breastly want, these soft
hands are not baby kill baby, girl baby boinked,
bunkered, bumped off by babbling
stream, washing basin, by old linen,
by the smell of garlic, is not two
daughters, sisters, the crow they
called son, bad son they’d say
when the crow tapped on the glass,
bad son they’d say when the crow
dropped an egg that meant too
many gullets to feed, their
gullets, our gullets
going lax the year that went
bad that went dusty
that went forsook and showed
us the character of stuff, the actual density,
nutrients, atoms, constitution
of stuff, that which can be
eaten, that which
cannot, so the next year,
when we regretted the last,
that it had happened, that
it had to happen, and went
looking for crows,
we discovered the world was
crowless too and things
bigger than a mother
and her wants, bigger
than the scavenger with the sun
at his throat who went after
the only calf, and bigger
than the sun who picked
another warm body to dress
The Taste of Things
There were words my mother
never taught me:
juniper
hamlet
stucco
junco
They filled
us up, these
unspoken words
neither of us
knew
Eventually quiet
broke open
A tree meaning nothing
to us
broke it
It coalesced
kept its sex
in grey-blue
berries
offered us
a drink
There
There was some
of the bitterness
without which we had lived