Empty Pitchforks

“There was poverty before money.” There was debtors’ prison before inmates, there was hunger prefossil, there was pain before a nervous system to convey it to the brain, there existed poverty before intelligence, or accountants, before narration; there was bankruptcy aswirl in nowhere, it was palpable where nothing was palpable, there was repossession in the gasses forming so many billion ... ; there was poverty—it had a tongue—in cooling ash, in marl, and coming loam, thirst in the few strands of hay slipping between a pitchfork’s wide tines, in the reptile and the first birds, poverty aloof and no mystery like God its maker; there was surely want in one steamed and sagging onion, there was poverty in the shard of bread sopped in the final drop of gravy you snatched from your brother’s mouth.