Daughter

I was looking for an old knowledge  
I could make new.

    Dehorn your cattle when the sign’s in the legs. 
    Kill a barn swallow, get blood in your milk. 
    Dig by the moon’s dark, prune by its light. 

I read all afternoon in my office on the third floor. 

A passage on shovels reminded me  
of crossing that one green pasture with my mother

before we buried her mother again, closer 
to our dead kin, the dairy bootleggers.

The dead can’t sleep if you’re always making noise, 
but I have never known a soul with my blood 
who wants to sleep, once dead, more than four days.

The women, especially, are always wanting 
to wake up, shiver in the grasses, sigh.

The worst pain of my life, I was far from the South, 
holding my belly, screaming in silence,  
and one came to me, ravenous, her eyes widening.

Taking my pain in and in. Like a lover

after a too-long, anguished absence  
drinking, as much as they can at one time, 

the expressions,  
freckles,  
eyes of the desired. 

I don’t know who she was, but she belonged to me. 

Her grave had been left open overnight 
leaving her to grasp after our awful music forever.

I felt myself all the way down 
to be full of sons, sons I would die with  
tucked inside, 

so when I found out I might be rounding with a daughter—
I had to walk many miles

when the sign was high in the knees 
and the knees were bent in snow

and sap, freezing in the trees, split  
loud slits up their middles,

lines a child pried open to enter

dug, but not yet cut by me.