January 28th: But What, Tell Me, What Are You Saying?

But What, Tell Me, What Are You
Saying?  A One Track Dialogue

Descendant:  I have nothing to forgive you for.

Ancestor: I have to be forgiven everything.

I want to say:
Your intentions were as honest as your blindness
Your intentions invented milk and innocence.

I want to say:
There are no one way streets where I grew up
only roads into woods where once they said a man I knew
only in graffiti in the shed left his cow by a tree to teach her
to find her own way home. And she stood
bawling until she dropped alone and cold
and desperately resolved to her abandonment.

I want to say:
I found her skull one day and asked how
the amber soak of her horns and bones came to be
the only honesty to exhume her that spring.  What couldn't be jawed
and lugged off by coyotes, what couldn't rot
into the moss fell still and quiet as all grave-
yards do even if and maybe especially
they are the acutely vacant: elderly
farm animals too old to milk or breed or eat.

I want to say:
maybe it's the teather that rots last, the loose
knot would've with one tug come undone,
that she could've walked down the hill trailing it
and her question like afterbirth and umbilical
back to the barn back to her stillborn calf back
to the grass that wasn't anymore and wouldn't
ever be again. 

I want to say:
I imagine (because the skull faces away from
home) that if she turned to look at you
while you walked away and out of sight
she might have resolved to meet you in some small way,
and instead her neck fluttered flies, eyes to hide to tail: bluebottles
match the best, their calm massage into pools
of saline at the corner of her mouth, the tip
of her nose...

I want to say:
I imagine you being through with it all and feeding
everything there was to feed: the perfect care
the grain the hay and maybe you took her
far enough away
so you wouldn't spook her loading the gun
while, coming ultimately undone, you put all your affairs
on the table and one by one drank them
shot after shot and everyone forgot
about her.

I ask:
why didn't it occur to them thoughtful as you were
your whole life with all your sons and daughters
how neat and tidy they found you, tidy
as a lie wrapped in bailing twine, passive
as a sky going by going by like feet beside
a cow's spine, her hide all grass now all green
or yellow or red fall leaf after fall leaf

I say:
when I found the skull covered, was it your
shadow never far from here
or the slow approach of my hand
that woke  the bones growing in me before
I have the chance or the need to pull away?