Make-Believe

Mostly dumb, but hens are finely tuned

to length of days, won’t lay in earnest

till after the equinox, sliver of additional light

they measure from their mud yard,

heads cocked to the sky. Same gut process, spin

of tumblers unlocking a stock of promise I feel for

and find nothing. If not instinctual calculus, the hens

perhaps receive a sign from a deity whose mythos

is beyond us, who allows the smallest

her status, her neck defeathered and red

from pecking. Hierarchical order made here

evident and cruel by the confines of the hog wire,

but flourishing in tree-lined neighborhoods,

their school districts, government and factory chains

of command in supposed exchange for the comfort

that some higher-up, snug in his pay grade, is taking

care of the coyotes or skunks, the exterior

threats who menace the edges. Calling god The Man

Upstairs makes god a boss, his office like all boss offices:

beyond reach, from which he chomps a cigar, orders

a new cumulonimbus, indulges his odd interest in the innocent

girl from my high school tennis team who called him

that, who pinned her wins on her daily memos

unto him. Unlike some birds with their museum

-quality architectures, chickens just scratch

a divot, deposit in it their contribution to the future

of birdkind. You see when you butcher a chicken

the row of yolks awaiting their containment

like cars on an assembly line: soft stuff of center

console, seats, and steering wheel, and then the shell

is built around it. Not, as I once thought, a hollow vessel

made then filled. SUVs exist that sense, in forward

or reverse, an approaching car, that brake and steer

within the painted lines, in whose ads

children asleep are safe in the backseat. No such thing

when I was young, when ads were telling us,

This is your brain. This is your brain

on drugs. Whole egg, egg cracked

in the skillet and sizzling,

as if the perfect analogy could cure all ills. I filled

the skunk’s tunnel with rocks, thinking, Let’s see him

dig through this, and in the morning he had

simply dug a new tunnel, adjacent. Fresh mess

of blood and feathers in the hen house. I’m that dumb

sometimes. I do my best. Sequester the poor hen-pecked one

to eat in peace, though I know it makes me soft

to care, to name her. I care. I name her, the one

I’ve come to imagine is holding out for me

to turn into a safer vessel: softer, spacious,

emptied of my petty cruelties. Nightly,

the mistakes I’m afraid I’ll make again

bloody each other in their confines.

My past scorn for the tennis girl who prayed

for something I believed

to be, in the grand scheme, trivial,

paces the hog wire. My own trivial yolk

keeps waiting in me for a better me before

she’ll don her protective shell, allow herself

to be made. Prayer it might be called, to conceive

crudely of her shape and judgment, to fear myself

unworthy, unable to drag my sorry over the long table

I’ve been eating at. Mind a mud yard, my hens mean

and reverent, they can’t help it, they’re helpless

and so what else is there to be.

I’ve long known all minor remedies

are mine alone, the vitamins, the timing, no divine

hand leads cord from socket to fire up

a heat lamp, no faux sun can fake my equinox—the boss

is me, little yolk, it’s just me. I do my best. Ice-crust

on the water trough thin enough

to see through, relentless presence of windows

the world makes but no sign of the sign

I know not to look for but look for anyway. What is it

I thought would be shown me? Little face

discernible in a thin moon, lunar mirror

sending the sun’s glimmer to the water, white plate

onto which I might, just by leaning over to look,

superimpose my own features, indulge a moment

of make-believe. Instead, the trough’s dim metal bottom,

scrim of silt. Instead, that barb I keep

catching on, between two things, make  -  believe,

I want to be one.