By March the hay bales were ripped open
exposed in the fields
like bloated gray mice
who died in December.
I came upon them at dusk
and their attar lifted my spine
until I felt like turning over an old leaf.
So I walked on, a walking pitchfork.
From every maple hung a bucket or two
collecting blood to be distributed across America
so people could rise from their breakfast
healthy, hoping to make a go of it again.
Now this is a riddled explanation
but I am a historian of pagan means
and must walk five miles a day
to cover the period I will call
The Great Loneliness
and the name will stick so successfully
that for years afterwards children will complain
at meals and on sunny days and in the autumn and at Easter
that their parents are unnecessarily mute
and their parents will look down harshly
upon the plates and beach towels and leaves and bunnies
and say you don’t know what you are talking about
you never lived through The Great Loneliness
and if you had you would never speak.
And the children will turn away
and consider the words, or lack of them,
and how one possible explanation
might be that inside our bodies
skeletons grow at an increasingly secretive rate,
though they never mention it,
even amongst themselves.