What will you do with the cat-gnawed creature,
the naked shudder in the grass?
You glance up, jaws unhinged by surprise.
Where did it come from?
The trees here have all died.
There are no nests.
Like a peeled fruit come alive,
it throbs in your palm.
What will you do with it?
You are clumsy, with bear-paw hands.
You might kill it simply by tramping
across the field, half-leaping, baboon-like.
It nibbles at the fat trap of your fingers.
When you arrive home, it tumbles onto the table.
The blood in your hands surprises you.
Bits of the red jewel dangle from its beak.
It is scarcely a bird.
How easy evolution is:
featherless and gaping, it is a lizard
scraped of its scales, bereft of tail.
Ridiculous. Why does everything come to that word?
Tell me, explain the child's game, this absurd gentleness
with cotton and eyedroppers,
the white shoebox, the false warmth.
My dear, I will tell you what I've known all along:
These things always die.
You waste hours, fussing, feeding it.
Expensive meat, too, chopped very fine.
For seven days, slivered screams prick the air,
fly about the house like needles.
Its neck, I say, would not be harder to crack
than three toothpicks dropped in a tiny sack.
I tell you to kill it, mercy being its own cruelty.
The raw bird quivers around its skeleton.
Blood sprouts and flowers on the cotton.
Tiny poppies, bitten rose petals, pinched kisses.
Again I urge you to kill it.
My luck, to be with a kind man.
What is the difference, dear,
between the gentle
and the weak?
One night I wake, slide out of livid sheets.
I am tired of this dying.
I find the fine braid of bone and nerve
and knock it over my thumb,
easy as opening a bottle.
A gristled crack snaps into my own bones.
The bird inhales its death hungrily.
Stillness.
All of this passed quickly in poor light,
with good reason.
But I do not sleep.
My hands feel like sullen rats.
Outside, I scurry over night's brisk teeth
to dig a hole for this meagre kill.
The grave, one of many, is very shallow,
very still.
Like the others, it will be easy to open up.
Nothing is forgotten.
Even gentleness fails.
The cotton is never that soft.
You hold a tendril of flesh
in your warm and healing hands, but it still dies.
Nights by all the graves, every one, pass with prayers
wailed to your own cold knees,
your blue-veined thighs,
to the blind dew-worms and their blind god
who is good, they say, and very wise.