Gathering the Darlings
I
They must have hunted us
in sleep —
great silent owls
trading places in the oaks
above our homes
Tracked us through wind
sweetgum sweat
trace phosphorous
bone-glow
As children, they renamed us
with shepherding words:
watch-box
sheared-one
crookit-horn
greener-than
and we
to their gloved hands came
downy things and careful
II
With the moon drawn slow
they led us
through halloween mazes
of their stately homes
Basements laced
with heating ducts
blind pipes
perimeters flowering
with ruderals
No one living there
exactly
No face to run our hands across
but a woman or a horse
heard kicking in the walls
There must have been a passage there
III
It must have been quite early
we learned dreaming on our backs
They wrote us into ledgers
with the weather —
great lakes pulling sheets over the town
Said
whosoever lives on land
will die on land
as all things born
beneath the ground
will stay there
Those words we learned
from birds of prey:
gauntlet
haggard
hood block
lure
and raptor from rapere
which is to seize
or take by force
They wrote us into ledgers
with the costs we incurred
one body worth
a thin blue yard of lace
In dark, we gathered every
claw-shaped leaf that fell
The moon rose high
above us anyway
equal in size
to the eye of a cask
IV
They must have hunted us
in sleep
swept us into oak trees
where the branches caught
our overcoats
Renamed us after ruins:
Amathus
Elea
Aptera
Cyrene
ancient cities
made beautiful by words
And we hung
shivering and silver
happy as bells
in the trees
the way that children
in the sky
will remain fixed there
as if fastened to the heavens
with nails
We must have learned quite early
about dreaming on our backs
Learned that a man will gnaw
into a heart
the way a beast might