every separate grain of your body

building the god, as I built you within me,

a sealed world. What if from your lips

I had learned the love of other lips,

from your starred, gummed lashes the love of

other lashes, from your shut, quivering

eyes the love of other eyes,

from your body the bodies,

from your life the lives?

Today I see it is there to be learned from you:

to love what I do not own.

Six-Year-Old Boy

We get to the country late at night

in late May, the darkness is warm and

smells of half-opened lilac.

Our son is asleep on the back seat,

his wiry limbs limp and supple

except where his hard-on lifts his pajamas like the

earth above the shoot of a bulb.

I say his name, he opens one eye and it

rolls back to the starry white.

I tell him he can do last pee

on the grass, and he smiles on the surface of sleep like

light on the surface of water.

He pulls his pajamas down and there it

is, gleaming like lilac in the dark,

hard as a heavy-duty canvas fire-hose

shooting its steel stream.

He leans back, his pale face

blissful. The piss, lacy and fragile,

arcs over the black lawn.

Afterwards, no hands,

he shakes himself dry, cock tossing like a

horse’s white neck, and then he

leans against the car, grinning,

eyes closed, sound asleep,

his sex pointing straight ahead,

leading him

as if by the nose

into his life, late May,

June, late June, July,

full summer.

Eggs

My daughter has turned against eggs. Age six

to nine, she cooked them herself, getting up

at six to crack the shells, slide the

three yolks into the bowl,

slit them with the whisk, beat them till they hissed

and watch the pan like an incubator as they

firmed, gold. Lately she’s gone from

three to two to one and now she

cries she wants to quit eggs.

It gets on her hands, it’s slimy, and it’s hard

to get all the little things out:

puddles of gluten glisten on the counter

with small, curled shapes floating in their

sexual smear. She moans. It is getting

too close. Next birthday she’s ten and then

it’s open season, no telling when

the bright, crimson dot appears

like the sign on a fertilized yolk. She has carried

all her eggs in the two baskets

woven into her fine side,

but soon they’ll be slipping down gently,

sliding. She grips the counter where the raw

whites jump, and the spiral shapes

signal from the glittering gelatine, and she

wails for her life.

Size and Sheer Will

The fine, green pajama cotton,

washed so often it is paper-thin and

iridescent, has split like a sheath

and the glossy white naked bulbs of

our son’s toes thrust forth like crocus

this early Spring. The boy is growing