my Mother, a battened, bony woman
With thick, long hair ---
usurping the father of skulled-and-crossboned skeleteons
Lies, poker-stiff, in a narrow, mercury-backed coffin.
Now the lie:
With childbirths, she'll be a winnowing grandmother.
They think weddings, bear kin
Song, the lady is a greatgrandmother
But this family is dead!
She companioned the gimcrack ghosts of a mouse, shrew.
They grin, wink at a gross barbeque,
of an ankle-bone and orange duck-feet.
the Dry taste of gnawed on ankle-bone looms
Riddles with antique grist and containing glass granite.
These three darlings, eating down from crumb to crumb,
witness museum-cased Archaeological Relics in Cambridge.
Here's to all the wakes for kin (her and mine own)
Each tang's whistle has to think on or ride by them.
Suck on this - hear it, been it.
We'd reach in the fishpond cradles to touch deadlocked stars under the surface
down between the day and blood stone
taking us back to the fourth A.D.
We go as Gulliver through a rock, roots, and barnacle
hag woman, daft mouse and grinding shrew.
until we get, by and by, to a sanctuary:
it's gone though, this armchair image of her clean home
where our unmasked hand, fit for the tick hands of a clock of any century,
haul the outlaws as if these didn't prove how the game went rigged.