After a bad night,
Goya might have invented turkeys.

Almost swamped by ink,

 1. (Starbuck)

After the abscission layers form
Waterflow to the pods' end.

Snow, rocks darker than any shadow in the world.
We glimpsed another life below us—cottages, goats—

But never imagined it would be so difficult.

We had been looking at an idol in a glass case,
size of a hand, admiring her tough little knobs
and the ball of her belly some barren woman

My Hamlet pulls his yes through an architecture of yeses
though it might appear that he merely negates,
sitting in the dark after murder,

Roots and rocks emerge from the forest path like half-
      spoken thoughts,
or as Thoreau would put it, the earth is saying “rock.” And

I take the dusty yearbook off the shelf
and scan the fledgling, mostly white, male faces:
a foreign country, but the aging self

I kept it hidden, it was easy
to hide, behind my lingerie, a shoebox

above my boys' reach, swaddled alongside

I will not give in. I will grow more strange.
I will wrap myself around your ghost till the ghost
itself wants letting go, till it shimmers free.

In Classical Attica it wasn't heinous,
tanned Danaan hands consigning cherubs
to the gods' protection, to die in earthen pots.