First Circle

It’s dark in here, the dark inside of a man in the dark. It’s not night. One hears crows overhead, dawn fowl caws, the shod soles again treading their sunlit plots above. One grows dotish-fond of such things. Long live the things, their ways, their roots pushed goatish & gray through the skull, in this earth that gaily spins though one has crossed its smutted green threshold to reign in a crate. We have done no wrong, my friends, & yet we find ourselves soiled, sold, carbonized teeth in a moss-riven jaw. Once I sat on a stool as my grandmother told me of heaven. She cleaned fish for our living. I saw how her rusty black knife unseamed the sunset in each belly—coral, ochre, carmine, raw, lice-infested sunsets in a pail. So many nights. Night in the kitchen shack, night at the crumbling edge of our milk-pond province, a blade, lone cricket raving in the lawn.