the raised cotton seam like the line

down the center of fruit, where the skin first splits

and curls back. You can almost see the hard

halves of her young buttocks, the precise

stem-mark of her sex. Her shed

skin shines at my feet, and in the air there is a

sharp fragrance like peach brandy—

the birth-room pungence of her released life.

The Killer

Whenever there’s a lull in the action, my son

sights along his invisible sights and

picks things off. He eyes a pillar

three rows over, pivots and easily

fires—a hit, you can tell by the flames and

smoke reflected in his glittering eyes.

Everything becomes a target—

cops topple, a whole populace

falls as he aims, yet I know this boy,

kind and tender. He whirls and lets them

have it. Tangents straighter than the arc of his

pee connect him to all he sees

like a way to touch: as the spider travels its

silver wires, our son goes out along his

line of fire, marking each thing

with the sign of his small ecstatic life.

The Sign of Saturn

Sometimes my daughter looks at me with an

amber black look, like my father

about to pass out from disgust, and I remember

she was born under the sign of Saturn,

the father who ate his children. Sometimes

the dark, silent back of her head

reminds me of him unconscious on the couch

every night, his face turned away.

Sometimes I hear her talking to her brother

with that coldness that passed for reason in him,

that anger hardened by will, and when she rages

into her room, and slams the door,

I can see his vast blank back

when he passed out to get away from us

and lay while the bourbon turned, in his brain,

to coal. Sometimes I see that coal

ignite in her eyes. As I talk to her,

trying to persuade her toward the human, her little

clear face tilts as if she can

not hear me, as if she were listening

to the blood in her own ear, instead,

her grandfather’s voice.

Armor

Just about at the triple-barreled pistol

I can’t go on. I sink down

as if shot, beside the ball of its butt

larded with mother-of-pearl. My son

leaves me on the bench, and goes on. Hand on

hip, he gazes at a suit of armor,

blue eyes running over the silver,

looking for a slit. He shakes his head,

hair greenish as the gold velvet

cod-skirt nonindent before him in volutes

at a metal groin. Next, I see him

facing a case of shields, fingering

the sweater over his heart, and then

for a long time I don’t see him, as a mother will

lose her son in war. I sit

and think about men. Finally the boy

comes back, sated, so fattened with gore

his eyelids bulge. We exit under the

huge tumescent jousting irons,