Little red rooster

.

January, 1958, The Year of Brother Rooster

.

This newborn fire

scampers across the yard,

stamps the ground with

hardscrabbled feet,

skinny, orange-scaled, tipped with nail.

.

Inside the house the mother's belly erupts in

Procession, through the window groans may

be heard, the air inside is full of sweaty faith,

serious business, women's work.

.

Somewhere, someone has written

an efficient volume on the

dismemberment of your lovers' bodies;

beneath the glare of a consumptive interest

you are, like a wick, gone out of yourself.

.

But, you are no black wick, resplendent

in your quick, provincial plumáge, muted

only by the dust spurred ascendently into

the air where it hangs around you like an

antique atonement with wood and wire and

the cackling of your thorny brood.

.

Brahma bird, you dance a firery dance of

love. Inside a woman labors. You have

announced the death of gods,

proved prophesies,

are born to war.

.

Blood cauled priest of the red carbuncle,

sturdy, turgid bird,

prodigious and possessive lover whose

heat the egging bodies of your charges

crave, plain white lovers press themselves

against your fire.

.

Behind the house, a silo full of grain, and

beyond that then the trees that lift the

January sun. Through the window the break

and snap of midwifery is heard. In the yard

the rooster's call is raised. Through a blowing

curtain, a nascent yowl springs forward. A gasp.

Exhaustion and relief.

.

The rumpled hens of morning pass the word,

garbled pidgin spreads from roost to roost,

infiltrates the busy air like droppings

everywhere, like feathers plucked, like blood

and semen, like bodies intertwined in the

cracked shell of a summer night.