Genealogy (rest)
       

Men loyal first off to silence run in my family.

Ask about the women we say women.

What a scream. Ask about the men we say.

Men loyal only to stillness run in my family.

Not the same, you understand, as when a man.

Who refuses to budge withdraws into himself.

As when one wounds a tree to draw its sap.

Only to find the bucket come evening is empty.

Men of such stillness you hear us pulse.

Loyal to nothing like my father whose father.

Was a man who when he saw himself said.

I am too small. Too small within this world.

And too full of talk. My life I would live.

Could I live as a potato bug loves, beating.

Myself into the ground when I need you.

Then comes the sun and draws its cutlass.

And Opa's tongue the first off to silence.

Story I learned my father wouldn't tell me.

For though he was a man who couldn't read.

Music, he still found a way to write it, his life.

A short movement composed solely of rests.

Two sons he had two summers far too loud.

Now I am finished with my strings, he says.

Enough hammer, enough sustain, the end.

Men loyal first off to sustenance or sentence.

Ask about the women we say what women.

We have are women who have nothing.

There is my brother leading a horse whose.

Hunger is so loud it shakes the earth shakes.

The trees and when the apples fall he eats.

If she feeds he feeds her only from his knife.

If she rides he rides her only when he leaves.

There is me. Loyal only to when I tell myself.

The boy who has written across his wrist.

I'm god would make a good son only if his.

Voice is a silence in which now I appear.

Ask about his mother he says mother.

Let her rip. Men who mean something.

Different than you when they say we.

Are loyal first off to the end, to the end.

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Copyright © 2012 Danniel Schoonebeek All rights reserved
from Crazyhorse
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission