--for Susan McCabe

        The woman with four thumbs
        Brought the rest of the men
        From the road crew
        To where the others have lowered the gravid pig
        Into a shallow ditch.

        The boy who drives ice picks
        Into their sand wagons is there
        Holding the pig's rope- She says
        He is one of two signs from Jesus they have found.

        Do they know his luck here, as well as theirs,
        Is the crooked path of sand the loaders lose from their wagons?
        They are laughed at by the cement mixer
        Who knows their load is short
        Before they have time to think of it.

        It's been a slow growing devastation
        To watch their embarrassment
        Repeated this week.

        The boy has studied The Book of Thel
        In a Kiev coat through the darkest snow of the year

        And in a letter to a lame aunt
        On an oilslick coast he has promised
        One day they'll eat smooth hound with lemon
        And red wine. They'll know
        The significance of the sow's having given birth
        To a legless boar.

        He has thought to think
        Beyond thinking's shortened lamps
        Because the woman asks him in Chinese every night
        Before bed Where did you leave your silver spaceboot?
        Showing him how not every child
        Wears their true colors
        With their first mask of the night.

        Chocolate birds screaming in the machines again.
  

Copyright © Aleister Guisinger, 2001.  All Rights Reserved.