This Bird
There’s a rooster here in town and he greets
the foggy morning with cold feet. I can see
him plucking up the mud of his pen, a delicate
step into the end of April this, as Eliot says, cruel,
cruel month. I wonder (because I can’t see him, only
hear, wonder) if his hens get tired of his puff
and swag, if they ignore him and get with
their day of taking the rain in strides of regularity:
they wake, they maybe lay an egg, they fake
and weave the way a pugilist may between
the shadows of her own feet, or, before the ropes
strip their back of flesh before they go down
on the matt (a stoop of old rail here to perch)
late, to shake out seed to make the egg pucker the air
and kick out when mister gets close enough
to have his way with spur and leg and under-
feather. He’s never considered, has he, when some-
one comes to take, all the children, his, that pass
through the gate, snug up in the warm
bucket, and those feet (mine when I was a child)
sideswiping the still possible, even at the end
of Aril, patch of ice, and if he does he, wish-like,
flings out some voodoo eye to the knee to buckle
and the bucket’s thrown and in the shell
all! see! rising up brief as brief a flight they’ll ever
get without a feather or a wing among them
the half dozen they are, maybe a couple more,
rising up and the gatherer the first to fall. Small
justice is supposed to be an atonement,
an attrition, and the noble take it on their shoulders,
and these never would be kids (shhh, he’s all
strut and dung crusted cloaca) cracked free
for the crows or the stray cat or dog. Still, he
goes on, calling all the shots: or tipping back
his head to spell it all out in the fog how the day’s
going to be, where we’ll stub our feet, where we’ll,
by some miracle, find our way, barely, just,
clear of the coop, free.
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