FIRST BORN SON

He grips his shaft, shy as a crab's palpus testing the dark. He has just been dreaming
of entering everyone he has ever known. A freight train moans ponderously through him,
swaying its shank of metal across long-dead
sea-beds of Mid-West. He is long gone,
too far gone, afraid of his window,
of eyes that might flare out there,
harsh and valpecular beneath hedge-light. He has spent a life-time retranslating road signs
he has read, comparing the crumbling mountains
and waterless rills of the moon to his own mother's
thronged and sagging flesh. He has grown old
listening to her bathroom coughing fits. Now, somehow, he feels larger than the billboard
that blares white and empty by the entrance to the highway.
He is almost there, can hear the slow grind
of traffic signals shifting, green to red,
the hush and rustle of night-time wheat fields all around, closing in.
He has woken to know that no one thing owns him,
that to grow is not a tangle of roots, but release.