Again
I’d left Paris for the beaches
in Spain. I’d sold
my dead father’s farm
and, in shame,
bought it back again
at a great loss . . . then
a plough found
a shelf of bismuth
and I sold just the north pasture
for big serial profits
and I am ashamed again:
the huge white bones of my father’s
favorite cow exposed
one late September morning!
It’s always been potatoes and bread
or millions of francs on speculation.
I am not stupid. I’m not dead.
But the bones of an old cow assemble
repeatedly now in a dream
where my naked lame father
sits in a tub of boiling milk
and screams at me
first my name and then his name
which is the same
name. The crimes of the verb to be
pushing a hard rain in general
across the city and its suburbs. . . .
by Norman Dubie
from Blackbird, Spring 2011