1.
Missed a day—bunny fogged in oak-leaves, whistling waters laid down and oak leaves piled, shuffling into the water-bed, a drink of water, a bunny with soaked face. There’s my mother’s fine house in Connecticut—well, I missed an appointment—I watched the hills rounding up and down—a day I missed—oak bared and sportive bunnys in the pebble’s-wash—OK.
A house built up square in Connecticut, and its upstairs bedchamber. Songs carried there from the barn—I thought and hoped I heard greater songs, walking with their feet in the hills... Yes, some men had lodged this house in the wood of the fields, here the sun walked over my head and walked over the hills...bare oak, my thoughts were with you!...but I missed that day!
2.
Who snuck behind that bunny, shook his scruff, and pushed him into the stream? Whose hands are white, fairer even than bunny’s? Why, mine. Who stood naked ‘neath his father sun, having cast his clothes aside, and shook his fists above his head—it was me—and then, what I did next was, I brought my fists together before my mouth, and I roared through them—spreading my fingers in interlace, I saw my father sun redden and knit his brows in the gaps between. I dropped to one knee and struck a stone—my hair fell to veil my face—trout leaped from the stream and spewed about its waters. Freckles rose on my shoulders—and they spread ‘til my arms ran brown—my nails hardened, became horny. My nipples misshaped, and breathed out skewing hair; blood leapt from my knee to mingle with the current’s run, and the trout swerved to lap it up.
My father shuffled the clouds into a staircase, and came walking down to me; two intervening lindens on the opposite bank bent backwards and knocked their heads to the ground, so that he might pass. My father neared—through my hair I saw his smiling face, framed by a ruff of flamingo feathers. He greeted me as his toe scraped the earth—“O man, my son! Long have I waited for you to recognize your features in my face! I come now as a father does, to judge as only a father does. And I say, thou brute, O deerblood-spattered, rabbit-mocker, trout-choker, O roarer, base vassal—I do sweep you from my sight”—he smiled wider—“make a mud-hut now to hide thy days in, and live if you can killing creatures of night!”
-2004
