Oration: Half-Moon in Vermont

A horse is shivering flies off its ribs, grazing Through the stench of a sodden leachfield. On the broken stairs of a trailer A laughing fat girl in a T-shirt is pumping Milk from her swollen breasts, cats Lapping at the trails. There's a sheen of rhubarb On her dead fingernail. It's a humid morning. Tonight, with the moon washing some stars away, She'll go searching for an old bicycle in the shed; She'll find his father's treasures: Jars full of bent nails, a lacquered bass, And the scythe with spiders Nesting in the emptiness of the blade And in the bow of its pine shaft. Milling junk in the dark, She'll forget the bicycle, her getaway, And rescue A color photograph of an old matinee idol. Leaving the shed, she'll startle An owl out on the marsh. By November It will be nailed through the breast to the barn. In a year the owl will go on a shelf in the shed Where in thirty years there will be a music box Containing a lock of hair, her rosaries, Her birth certificate, And an impossibly sheer, salmon-pink scarf. What I want to know of my government is Doesn't poverty just fucking break your heart?