His claws and beak, tools of hunger, classify
Kernels on a tree powdered into gold.
I wish I did not recognize myself in him.
Where is his murder? He marks his boundaries,
Removing wood from corn, placing corn
In gullet, no flock beyond the sky and caw
Of hunger. A metal thing, he is,
Ball-bearing eyes and hammered feathers
Rusting away. He sorts to understand,
Desperately separating grains from wood grain,
A glutton wasting half his food.

This is a poem about analysis, I think, about the impulse to understand, and about what we lose and gain in the process. Mostly lose, in this case.

This was a man with wooden hands. He danced to heavy beats
but in the silence of his closet Mussorgsky bellowed.
He greeted with an hidalgo turn of wrist, and breathed the country,
inhaling its people and brushing the industries off his upper lip
like the foam from stiff beer. The kind of man
Who searched for the foundation stone of mountains.

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I grew up in one of those New England towns
that called its river a beach.
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