Thatcher Bitchboy

She had brought home just a single white wing was all,

only that one through all the hellish August weeks

the fat man’s chickens kept disappearing into,

and that one wing I buried myself in the manure pile

behind the barn, so that by the time he finally arrived,

Fat Man oozing from his high-backed truck

like a gristly hock onto the hot black skillet of the county road,

mostly all I felt was the least yawny pang of nerves.

I sat with my dog by the front porch.

‘Thatcher bitchboy?’ he asked,

and I allowed as how she was.

‘Daddyhome?’ he croaked,

and soon we all were there,

Daddy and me, that good bitch hound of mine sleeping

in a mottle of the day’s last sun and shade, and the fat man

brandishing his blurred implicational snapshots.

There rose then a cloud of Daddy’s might-could-bees

and a cloud also of Fat Man showly-izzes,

the sudden stormification of

which could have been why the sky itself

came on so holy and dark just then, a dreadnought cloak

I hoped the Goddumb damn dog would run off under,

but it was only when the light from Momma’s

lamp in the living room window showed them there,

that it ended, and the fat man tied a rope

to the collar that convicted her,

and she licked his blunt and bulbous fingers with love

and servility (‘tastez lack chickin doe-nit daug,’ he chortled to the dirt).

Good cur hound, your eyes on me leaving were a blue

I believed the starved-blood likes of God’s own ledger,

all the betrayals in all the lands of earth and more

recorded therein, a blue like the lost unredeemable sky