BROOD
after Goya’s Pinturas Negras
Saturn never expected
to devour his children,
his fingertips digging
into their ribs, light
-headed. Didn’t start
out weeping, or sense
as he hid in his winter bath
on that murky morning
up to his eyes
gazing over
the loosely level
surface that healed
its holes as his knees
withdrew. And he didn’t
remember it later
that night, even after
he found dried blood
in his nails. The steady rush
was all he recalled, a creek
after rain, a head slumping
forward, a riddle resolved.
One son he had raised
to the light like
a t-shirt he’d worn
every day for weeks
on end for a band
he could no longer stand.
GROUNDED
if then
they climb
nod off your roof
as static hail a cloud
drowns the anchor’s voice a bleak one teeming
freed from the pull of what they were with lightning & hug the chimney
searching for & settling at last sing the periodic table
into their separate all the metal names
silences mercury
biting copper
their tin
tongues zinc
DREAM IN WHICH I SUDDENLY WEEP FOR X
Wanting not to be
misunderstood but blunder-prone
and only half-afraid, I tell
my friend, who squints at me
from a bundled roll of hay where he picks
at bits of straw even though we’re supposed to be
leaving, my friend, a young man who’s passed
between the sphinxes of Coltrane
and Miles (taped as they were
to the drywall of his dorm) innumerable
times while bearing his horn
to and from practice, I tell him
for some reason I’ve heard Malcolm
in person (when in truth, I’ve only
seen films) and not wanting
to be pinned in my lie, I rush
to share some particular, how
the folks in the front row tossed
their heads back when Malcolm
asked who taught you
to hate the texture of your hair
and who taught you to hate
yourself? and how the ladies
in the front row laughed,
their long-gloved hands lifting
from their laps, which is true (I saw
the crackling footage), but not
wanting my love for that laugh
to be viewed as missing its majesty,
I pause, and he cocks his head,
and I back up noticing also at his feet
where the falling straw gathers not
the stump of a tree but the severed thumb
of a giant, and backing up past even
the beginnings of language, I give up
trying to say flat out that it could’ve
been Chris Rock how hard they laughed,
the irony so blunt they couldn’t help
but lose it, and instead all I say
is this shrinking version of the truth:
He was dead serious, but—
He was dead serious—
