What Brands Us: Buoy

What Brands Us : Buoy

The cocks are now almost inaudible.

The sun climbs in,

following “to see the end,”

faithful as enemy, or friend.

                                        Elizabeth Bishop

                                        Roosters

We have that at least and the sea

the foam feet cold as the untold

egg I found (how lifting up her skirts

the hen doesn’t walk off in some trance

but today’s dead right there on the nest

and her friends bob and blink

and say nothing.  A weasel my father

may have said) as I held the cooling shell.

The morning was thick with warming suet,
his new Styrofoam buoys, he was guiding

the Bunsen flame point, the rub

of the igniter I loved the sound of,

and in all that wind his lit pencil melted

each place he stayed, like flesh

maybe, or wax a the lip of the brass

bobeche.  I loved watching it all

part so clean at first and pain

free--the way an egg is laid away

through the cloaca and then has nothing on it--

yesterday that hen bragged and blew

her hymn snubbing my hand between

under... and such warm!  Have you ever

felt the unassuming love on the straw?

I’m sure she had another beginning

even as I eased my hand away full

of all that her body

could manage.  Today her sisters had

clucked and gawked at her breast

feathers lift without her.  And that egg,

cooling, going out, I imagine, going solid

like the reverse of those buoys

that don’t know, in their stiff ignorance,

the ocean yet, or rope, or the wooden

lathe driven through their throat

to float for a cut of water then caught on

the hook as the boat goes by,

and they fly, just once, then come down

near the bushel basket with a hen

in the bottom of it until farther out

on the last trap of the string

he’ll fling her ceremoniously:  maybe

she'll lift up with that buoy and warp, 

maybe she'll float beside the cedar

lathe for just long enough for my father

to look and then look away, turn

his bow and boat to home, to one barn

one rooster now one less than several

hens and a hole to shingle.  The night’s

minus a throat; but still: listen: fog horn:

cock crow, hens, those left, like cattle, low.