Matt Donovan

There are no limits to our verbs, our forms:

                                                                        think of the knife

that slits an orange or bundled iris stems, the one strapped

to the rooster’s varnished spur. The dagger, poniard, dirk.

Edge that snips the line, whittles an owl, juliennes, traces a lip.

A cut, an incision, a gouge. In Sudan, the story goes, when the slogan

of reform was The Future’s in Your Hands, men scavenged the streets

waving machetes, hacking off hands above the wrist, asking

How will you hold the future now? The stiletto, the skean, the scythe,

The choosing, the mark, the tool. Beneath a concrete bridge,

shirtless & drunk, a boy works his way through the swallows’ nests,

slashing until each mud cone-shape drops into the river, dissolves.

Yet to say so is hardly enough. To say pigsticker’s, bayonet, shiv.

That my body, Lord, might rise too, resurrected reluctantly from earth,

given the rainwater, the dawn begun, grave walls pitched into ooze,

given that the scheme to bury me deeper in my own grave’s dirt will fail

because of schnapps & mud & Lord, let the breath of those who deliver me

that night be sweetened by cherry-tipped cigars. Allow what will lift me

fumbling the first March of my death to be not only a shovel, the grace of rope,

a mechanic’s coat trussed to brass handles, but also the plan for a paid-for garage,

paved cement floors, a procession of wrenches in a drawer. Grant me

morning light in a pickup bed, lying within earshot of Bulgarian songs that rhyme

thigh with smoke & permit me, Lord, once hangovers wane, to be stashed

at the far edge of a field, close to the rocks of a fishing spot where a thief will always—

or for more than a week—watch me, conceal me, keep me in spring heat, devour

a plum & suck its pit clean, dream of cash he half knows won’t come. Let my reward,

Lord, be crow wings, furrows, bits of last year’s stalks, three threadbare burlap sacks. 

                                                                                   Odd,

how in the watercolors for The Birds of America, we’re missing

the engraver’s final work: the river is just a few light-blue strokes

& instead of an intricate tangle of grass, a merganser soars

through an empty page. Aesacus,

                                      for a while, isn’t finished either,

though he will be soon. Even as he thrashes in his rage & grief, 

not quite bird or man, he can feel it, the lure of it beginning

in his beginning-to-be-hollow bones. What else can he do

but unburden himself, give himself over to the body’s suppleness,

its impossible glistening, the grace afforded after all?