I picked you from a brood of faxes:
blurred letters, blurred past,
You were mine for a week.
A faintly positive called ‘chemical’ and
they said your DNA just didn’t add up,
so the interjections, the fullness, the glottal stopped and you left.
Back in the fields grasping for gleaned grain
it’s never too early to grieve, stuck in traffic,
staring at pint-sized, van-dalized nuclear doodles smiling,
I wonder what they call you–those that know you now.

- – -

Staring into the only two skies that matter,
cypress weaved into their spheres with
sunset skin and streams of autumn gold,
rolling fields broken with brunette rooftops.
A barnyard squeel of delight at reunion
trotting forward, counting days till harvest.

“Something’s in the water.” Chuckles surround.
“I’m due. Get ‘em out with spicy Thai.”
Down in straps infants spit-up over shoulder and lapse
the recurring flow–before nine and after one,
suckling two, singled out, like the single ones so few
within the stained. Glass. Body–broken.
Created to create, duty to do, should we adopt, a different view?
Turn a cheek when asked if trying instead of
shoving our Brothers and Sisters, sighing:

A gleam in God’s eye, a moat in mine.
Doused at a shower: games and pastel flower
present from the eye, a tear, ducks out early dashing hope
upon the rocks by Babylonian stream, the placenta’s quite salty,
but ’tis sweeter than bare melancholy.

Christened: yet another granny or grandpa’s claim,
last week’s was not averse to holy, genocidal names–
ache and money enough can get triple the glow, the pound,
the flesh, the ounce add up every week, you know, weighing down,
C-cups runneth over to nursery wants ten more
fingers, ten more toes, to fight the battle
in the basement of babies booming below.

Impregnated with fertility in winter–in spring:
proud pistils sing standing up theirs in-carnations
on Sunday two of–May the un-mothered run away.
But no matter the year, we worship a child in the end:
bowing to our cherubs in bathrobes, tiny babes in bulletin,
sliding through choruses on the backs of asses to Bethlehem.

For God so loved the world that he sent an advent series
every year to remind the shepherdess, in her barren fields,
to treasure up these things and ponder them.

Flushed at this funeral, a little red-faced and now wasted:
somatic septic cells in fetal position rowing, then wading through fecal
mix in matters (too private to halt) with dioxins to incinerate lungs of pets and
pets that are children and yes, even, children, but that wouldn’t be green.
Pieces: umbilical, ambivalent, paraxial, personal, particles,
a gorey inconvenient truth, a choice warming in an all too earthen oven,
too full for responsibility to try ‘n muster the strength to alter a sound to see
my tiny body.