Beggars

are branches scraping an empty metal bowl

at dawn—

are urchin birds sifting through bark

and brush, asphalt and gravel—

are raggwool-skeined hills unraveling—

are dove purling from a basket-weave

of pine—

are starved—until one cardinal

wells, a needle prick in the pecan tree.

That morsel of color, a hint

of blood makes me say the pecan husks

still on the tree are winter flowers,

and the cedar is not dying

but variegated—

to say my friend twitching through frowns

and grimaces of drugged sleep

is an infant, and his fingers, playing

invisible keys, are not calculating

—banker, Baptist, payment

in hard, cold cash—but reliving

his photographs:

hay field salted with frost; bluebirds

fresh-hatched and gaping; a box-turtle,

beaked in the satin red of a tomato—plush

as the inside of a coffin—

When are we not hungry?

To buzzards, the charitable road

gives dead possum for free—

raw wound scabbed in blood-black,

the ravenous birds now peeling off with

cleric's rustle, hinge's creak,

now settling in a tree, muttering cure curate

and eyeing me, the heretic who takes

but doesn't eat.

gasp is something

sharp, insistent, cunning—

something that gives us this day—

beggartick, burdock, cocklebur—

barb and spine stitched into shanks,

shoe lining, socks—

kneeling here in these curious

whispering weeds—

what makes fast keeps feeding—

hearing the buzzards curse—

O fanatic

may you blister—

Your shadow favors the inbred

emboldened worm,

the ingratiating fly,

and considers not

who cannot afford, unearned,

unearned ligament, tendon, intestine.

With our flight you purchased

meat that your eyes alone,

because they eat

dishonestly, steal outright.

We are stained by what we breathe

freely, but you,

by abstaining, contaminate.

Approximate, unclean

licker, finish and be off

that we may return

to the stench of friends

who feed us;

and after us, flies;

and after flies,

wind.