Birthright
………………………………………………………Come ye blessed children of my father,
………………………………………………………inheret ye the kyngdome prepared for
………………………………………………………you from the beginninge of the worlde.
We’re stealing a car painted in wings and dromedaries.
We’re memorizing words we don’t know how to pronounce,
“pince-nez,” “prodigal,” and we’re scrambling
on a sandstone lane, rattling up a clouded slide,
down spines of soldiers, to the river gate,
which isn’t white pickets. Stare through
to a rack of bones, integument of apple and cherry
where the hoot owl spooks night after night—
number trees stripped of names and seeds
sprigging narrow trunks by stumps.
Father families mimic a manner to pass home to blood.
They christen children. Who sews dresses
to fold, who signs statues that don’t rot, not carts
blooming with mold on axles guttering to dust, back doors
twitching on hooks like jackets, beehives soaring decay?
Don’t drink that honey, don’t smear it on your bread.
These people barter in accent. You finger a painting
of parched marble and someone asks, Do you know how?
I don’t know anybody. We skip the academies,
Saturday, the students gallop on merry-go-rounds,
growing up to look like us. A screen’s slit
in the attic where we simmered. Paper’s
taped in the staircase window, ledger and debt.
We tell time by the markets, signs tarnished
plum, the closets echo, no clothes but a sour smell.
We tell time by the railroads, the workers’ secrets.
They marched home in starlight naked of coal and iron.
Remember counting stripes in the coats of convicts?
You buried your face like a dog. Now I sleep in a hotel dug
where a gelding drank from a pond feathered by hens.
I still sway astride the top of his neck’s trick ramp.
We never bargained to climb angles and dream
into a blind valley, the station of pebbledash
roofs and roads, sarcoid and chalcedony,
bass and weed, sickroom and dulcimer heaven.
We never asked to twist inside out like stained trousers,
knot the sleeves of the sidelong past into plains.
We’re hiding. The sun won’t believe you’re a wheel.
I’ll commit a crime, kicking behind the ghosts passed down,
claiming we marked this path with every stick that shows.