Scarecrow

I wonder if you, at the back of your throat,
chew the cud of us.
Flavor gone bland, molars
working to extract some vestigial molecule of nourishment.
Does its bulk retain any memory of sunlight
at the center of the blade?

A crow on the roof squawks,
talons hammering against the chimney.
She has visited that body in the field
whose face houses eyes forever open,
mouth a terror of a smile.
Straw dust carried across the low belly of the sky
rains into the hearth.

I remember how you wrapped my hands in ribbons
and held steady a sleeve of sand
fat as the giant’s thigh.
When my knuckles bled, you tended them.
The string of scars now sing
forget, forget
the grinding bones,
the rising bread.

We sat on a corner neither of us visits anymore
as I begged you to want us,
curdling in my raw, pebbled skin
even as I dug post-holes for a fence
to gird my want.

I could not help veering again
and again
through the knotted barbs
onto your patch of earth,
trying to claim any corner,
even the fallow part, the peat-bog part.
to sow my meager garden.
You only visit now
when surveying your borders
but you must still hear
the bullfrog’s twang, the dragonfly’s hum,
our breath, our prism of song.

You could have chosen to see with eyes
I plucked out of my head
and placed in your hands.
Did you plant them
when I decamped?
Do they still stare out from a burlap face
propped on a stake
at the back edge of your property?

The crow’s scratch echoes down
the flue’s blistered walls,
like that single orphaned shred of green
alighting in the barren patch
where sweet gives way to bitter,
splitting itself yet again
trying to take root
despite the salt you spread
after me.