The Ancestors Explain How Envy Grew

Calm appeared, his soul stopped, a crow staring as he snatched down miniature angels, trapped them in jars, capping the light away to make a hush out of glory songs, a crying out from the joyful aubades they breathe as easy as moonlight on jars of preserves, their throats full of fear now, the brave breast crumpled in his child fingers, their prisons invisible to the cherubim searching for heaven's missing songsters trapped in blind ways of getting even at a world that would make him small, make him an impotent wonder, curl his genius under like a witch's toes when his father died chewing on cheese and cornbread, chocolate surprise in the sun, an unkind ending. He grew in the way of genius, no charts showing where he ended and the world began, how cities figure in the jagged sweep of cornfields, endless thousands of shouts up into the evening, listening to the future speaking, like the old man in the schoolyard, a stranger by the wishing pond in the woods, or dogs that stand up like men in hats— these the Corinthian signs he mistook for an alphabet giving the right to molest children. Now wisdom is sour rubbing medicine pasted over nightmares, not the proper wealth of an old man, the arms of his neighbors around him like laurels.