OPERATING INSTRUCTIONSBegin at night. The crippled rooster swings
a rusted wing outside your window. Ignore it.
A face, mottled in shadow, looks up in numb
wonder at a highway overpass. This is your subject.
His childhood is rushing through him. Not in memory,
but in a dim impulse toward growth. As if something
were naming him, and the wind, and it was the same name,
and he was forgetting it even as it's made. Approach him
with care. Forceps are too clumsy, tweezers an insult to scale.
Your open hand will do. Turn it slowly. Let him feel
how loose the ground is beneath him. Then close your hand,
make a cupped, hollow fist, like you once did with summer
lightning bugs. Wait for the trapped, sporadic glow to show itself,
until your knuckles flare like pinioned mountain lamps.
There is something fierce in its message, mindless but defiant;
a teletype no one will read. Think again
of the small life that pulses in your fist.
It is not the face of a stranger, or an insect.
It is something you invented.
You know you have it in you to crush it.
How reasonable it is to want such things.