Don't Let Farmers Run You Over

don’t let farmers run you over, grandpa
told me,
and I almost asked him what was wrong with farmers,
but his head swung,
his ears tied into tightropes in his neck
and his teeth gritted like dull machinery --
as they crack themselves to life
and the brown gears, groaning with rust,
and the smell of mildew growing deep
within these machine guts
     play spread-eagle on his cheek.

-- to make his soul a giant lava lamp,
with the faces of a biography in its crescent shape.
and the half-moon plays its tune upon his old lips;
in silver upon the unshaven slide of his skin,
bursting with memories like a waterfall of white pills,
the ballet dancers playing with the moon in the shape of brilliant stars
and in that movement, his eyes are no color at all they are
so glory-blind

and in the wake
of his visions are seen the portraits of Animal Farm,
whose people dug holes with their fingers
tented into shovels.

hundreds of pounds of dirt
packed into rough sackcloth;
hundreds of miles to walk
for the great city of our modern world.

the swamplands carried are brought to new places,
not for clean palace floors; not for soft cake like a feather pillow; but
for a child’s adventure and mud games in the summer
his eyes close, and our maimed mothers
cry to devour this land
for the love that scrapes at the rim of their tin belly.
that’s two hungers for a slice of bread;
with a scream of triumph
so awful it rings,
one empty wallow in the air and she will breathe it over my palace floor,
and the wind that comes will be on the wings of blackbirds --
a hundred for each clod and rock she had to move,
fluttering in through brass windows and the blast of trumpets weaved heavily
into its sibilant beak;
great drums the pounding of their wing.
for every time they made her wait outside the church: a thousand more
to coat the pillars in a vine mosaic,
all black-speckled with golden ribbons melted in their tail-feathers,
miles long so that swelling radiance sweeps the earth they have walked


learn to smile grandpa, when you are
shaking from grateful tears,
that I too see as the sleek glisten of a bird’s eye
and the fall of ballet girls;
their swollen knees and ankles
hidden in the folds of our world and so like the coarse cloth
of an old man’s wrinkled forehead, crisp with a family inheritance --
the only one which god gave us,
pounded upon our heads like the blunt edges of a hammer,
with the same pounding headache --
our mother.
triumphant