Beggars

Laura Gray Street 

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Are branches scraping an empty metal bowl  at dawn

are urchin birds sifting through the bark

and brush, asphalt, and gravel

are Ragg wool-skeined hills unraveling

are dove purling from a basket-weave of pine

are starved until one cardinal well, a needle prick in the pecan tree.

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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:

 

Hayfield 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.

 

But you, my possum friend, what you see

is a mystery, and how it uses you brilliantly. I steal back time and again, fixing you clearly, stain by stain until your bones are stripped of flesh and stench

and dragged away I say nothing, nothing, nothing

until the chant repudiates, flies in the face of nothing so nothing the very gasp is something sharp, insistent, cunning something that gives us this day beggarticks, 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.