DOMINION

Bells toll in the distance, announcing a long and steady ache. This day begins and ends like a kingdom. As if nothing
were your own, as if the next word you spoke
could be traced back to the first word ever spoken, and so on. I think of the perfect egg cream waiting
at the corner luncheonette, where men with sagging faces
and arms like rough corded fire-wood crack their beer cans and talk about the last days of some other empire.

A story is being told. Wrap the dying hero
in his bloody birth-cloth and launch him;
this has been going on too long.
The father who curses his daughter for losing
a quarter in the pay phone, who kicks his son
for wearing the same swollen, slit-eyed expression
he does, who grips and grips a roll of electrician's tape
and a half-drunk Pepsi while he lists the fifty-odd
forms of hate; there is nothing personal in that. It is all part of a larger dominion.

Look, the father rises, puts on his work boots and a few sturdy words; he's a new man by the end of the weekend.
His daughter's lips are crooked and blue. She has a story
to tell at school that Monday, about the beginning of the world. In it, her father's hand is a fish.

There is nothing alive on the surface of a snow-pop.
When the sun melts us, that is all we have inside—
a wooden popsicle stick. They are gathered
and sterilized and brought to the school nurse, to depress the tongue. Is this a time of sickness?
A mouth hangs open, and from that
words and words will come.
Your forehead is hot, is it a fever? Is this where the world came from?