Make-Believe
Mostly dumb, but hens are finely tuned
to length of days, won’t lay in earnest
till after the equinox, sliver of additional light
they measure from their mud yard,
heads cocked to the sky. Same gut process, spin
of tumblers unlocking a stock of promise I feel for
and find nothing. If not instinctual calculus, the hens
perhaps receive a sign from a deity whose mythos
is beyond us, who allows the smallest
her status, her neck defeathered and red
from pecking. Hierarchical order made here
evident and cruel by the confines of the hog wire,
but flourishing in tree-lined neighborhoods,
their school districts, government and factory chains
of command in supposed exchange for the comfort
that some higher-up, snug in his pay grade, is taking
care of the coyotes or skunks, the exterior
threats who menace the edges. Calling god The Man
Upstairs makes god a boss, his office like all boss offices:
beyond reach, from which he chomps a cigar, orders
a new cumulonimbus, indulges his odd interest in the innocent
girl from my high school tennis team who called him
that, who pinned her wins on her daily memos
unto him. Unlike some birds with their museum
-quality architectures, chickens just scratch
a divot, deposit in it their contribution to the future
of birdkind. You see when you butcher a chicken
the row of yolks awaiting their containment
like cars on an assembly line: soft stuff of center
console, seats, and steering wheel, and then the shell
is built around it. Not, as I once thought, a hollow vessel
made then filled. SUVs exist that sense, in forward
or reverse, an approaching car, that brake and steer
within the painted lines, in whose ads
children asleep are safe in the backseat. No such thing
when I was young, when ads were telling us,
This is your brain. This is your brain
on drugs. Whole egg, egg cracked
in the skillet and sizzling,
as if the perfect analogy could cure all ills. I filled
the skunk’s tunnel with rocks, thinking, Let’s see him
dig through this, and in the morning he had
simply dug a new tunnel, adjacent. Fresh mess
of blood and feathers in the hen house. I’m that dumb
sometimes. I do my best. Sequester the poor hen-pecked one
to eat in peace, though I know it makes me soft
to care, to name her. I care. I name her, the one
I’ve come to imagine is holding out for me
to turn into a safer vessel: softer, spacious,
emptied of my petty cruelties. Nightly,
the mistakes I’m afraid I’ll make again
bloody each other in their confines.
My past scorn for the tennis girl who prayed
for something I believed
to be, in the grand scheme, trivial,
paces the hog wire. My own trivial yolk
keeps waiting in me for a better me before
she’ll don her protective shell, allow herself
to be made. Prayer it might be called, to conceive
crudely of her shape and judgment, to fear myself
unworthy, unable to drag my sorry over the long table
I’ve been eating at. Mind a mud yard, my hens mean
and reverent, they can’t help it, they’re helpless
and so what else is there to be.
I’ve long known all minor remedies
are mine alone, the vitamins, the timing, no divine
hand leads cord from socket to fire up
a heat lamp, no faux sun can fake my equinox—the boss
is me, little yolk, it’s just me. I do my best. Ice-crust
on the water trough thin enough
to see through, relentless presence of windows
the world makes but no sign of the sign
I know not to look for but look for anyway. What is it
I thought would be shown me? Little face
discernible in a thin moon, lunar mirror
sending the sun’s glimmer to the water, white plate
onto which I might, just by leaning over to look,
superimpose my own features, indulge a moment
of make-believe. Instead, the trough’s dim metal bottom,
scrim of silt. Instead, that barb I keep
catching on, between two things, make - believe,
I want to be one.
