January 30th: When the First Time is Stink and Scab

January 30^th: When the First Time is Stink and Scab

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

                                                                Robert Hayden

                                                                Those Winter Sundays

It was forty three maybe forty

four years ago that first time

though it’s only my nose that’s kept

the memory, yes, only my nose

and maybe those spots on my body:

the small of my back that gets cold

in the winter time and scaly

as a flounder.  The place maybe

he touched me first but I can’t be

sure only if you had me in the middle

of a crumbling room with the ceiling

beams poking through and their copper

stains I thought looked like the open mouths

of his two too many toothed dogs

That room I was sorry in, that smelled

like my father’s barn after a blizzard

kept him digging too long to the steer

and the chickens and the bawling

udder-engorged cow, how he’d say later

if only the calf hadn’t been halter

chained he'd've gotten to her and she needn't

have split. But I rubbed her and that cold tight

chap, I rubbed her reluctance to let me

give her the relief that ointment deep

in the skin and all the pink places

that put her to sleep just rubbing

or at least to sigh into her own, what I’d

hear in her thick thigh sigh and her hot bawl

getting soft to where it all seemed

to let down easy as a ditch

after plugged stones and leaves, after a slice

widening it and all the debris comes

busting through and the raw copper’s

dulled with the grateful water pulled down

like milk is pulled, pulled until it’s almost dry

of its anxiety until all that bawling was

breathing easy when I turned the calf

to her.  Or at least the big question

was eased when I got up off the stool

and she turned as far as her chained face

let her to look at me and she breathed

deep like all dumb things breathe

when men like me keep their promises
even after some delay, and they're 

quick and clean as a bucket gleam even

with sweet beginners luck of polish and spit

and her reactionary blood of every girl's

first time after standing through the storm.