A Mythological Birth Story

She declines the bonnet my grandmother sewed in piss-smelling Fall River tenements, I pass on her collection of African art. We papered one wall with pages torn from a bible, but somewhere in that joyful altar-making we fell apart and drifted away, and it still hurts, it is still felt as a loss. There's sand in the sheets, the oyster shells are broken before we collect them, and the grave of the last dog was missing for several hours the other night. If you listen, the bellowing goats remind you how everything comes down to hunger. I was lied to a lot, there's no getting around it, and have become a skillful if reluctant deceptor. At dawn, when everything is soft and luminous, you can most readily perceive the one life behind all appearances but oddly still miss the final step which is realizing that life does not love the way you were promised it would love. Leaping off the quarry wall, carrying the sun down with me down. Mice eat through the floorboards of the barn, and the barn leans dangerously west, like sliding off a sheet of ice into the sea. Oh look, we're mixing our metaphors again. There are so many uses to which a sentence can be put, why do we have to choose just one! As I am writing and this is the writing I am writing. As what is broken is very close now, like a rough beast or a mythological birth story. My love, my secret, my unnamed and never kissed.