Kin

When news came that your mother’d smashed her hip, both feet caught in rungs of the banquet table, our wedding rebroken on the memory of the long lake of silence when the stones of her body broke as an Irish fence of stones, I saw your wet dugs drag with the weight of our daughter in the quick of her sleep to another feeding; then the shoulders dropped their broken antenna branches of fear at the knife running the scars which had been born into the colon for the misspent enema, the clubbed liver unclean with the stones of the gall bladder, and the broken arch of hip lugging you to the lake, the dough inner tube of lading swollen with innerpatching. I pick you up from the floor of your ringing fears, the floor where the photographs you have worked into the cool sky of the gray you love, and you are back at the compost pile where the vegetables burn, or swim in the storm of your childhood, when your father egged you on with his open machinery, the exhaust choking your sisters, and your sisters choked still. Now this voice stops you in accusation, and the years pile up on themselves in the eggs of your stretched sons, one born on his birthday, both dead. I pull you off into the sanctuary of conciliation, of quiet tactics, the uttered question, the referral, which will quiet the condition you have seen in your mother’s shadow, the crutches inching in the uncut grass, and the worn body you will carry as your own birthmark of his scream.