They grew in our backyard, the Bartlett and the Gestler
and though now I know trees aren’t sexual like us,
I didn’t know what sexual meant, I only knew what all five-year-olds knew,

The guinea hen of Manalapan
has a wattle like a turkey, but cut short.
Her feathers have spots like streaked paint.

Her body, first found dead, teeming with pills,
was quite alive actually.

It’s true the shop man had slim fingers

but hers were slimmer, florid and ancient
in their urge to find places, curious places

It could take from Monday to Thursday
and three horses. The ink was unstable,
the characters cramped, the paper tore where it creased.

Henry Ford boasted
there would be no Egyptian mummies in his museum.

Horses with wings and horses with shoes.
White stallions sacrificed to Roman gods.
Scythian kings buried with fifty horses.

I dreamt my love was lost, uncomforted.
He lay alone in Pavia, eclipsed
by fortune, by the catastrophic tides

Bright scab of track.
Bright stitch each train
rips out. In negative
 
degrees, metal cowers
as if a god had threatened
to curse it,

Somewhere (where) in between say 
Index and middle fingers, to one day- 
Wake up and find growing a new rather