Toth Farry

In the back of the charm-box, in a sack, the baby canines and incisors are mostly chaff, by now, split kernels and acicular down, no whole utensils left: half an adz; half a shovel, in its broken handle a marrow well of the will to dig and bite. And the enamel hems are sharp as shell-tools, and the colors go from salt, to bone, to pee on snow, to sun on pond-ice embedded with twigs and chipped-off skate-blade. One cuspid is like the tail of an ivory chough on my grandmother's what-not in a gravure on my mother's bureau in my father's house in my head, I think it's our daughter's, but the dime Hermes mingled the deciduals of our girl and boy, safe- keeping them together with the note that says Dear Toth Farry, Plees Giv Me A Bag of Moany