Nuggets

Emptied, precious, querulous, frail,

a box of butter biscuits by the bedside,

dun pills in a pale plastic tray,

your grandmother lies in her tiny bones

and mumbles, mysterious, while you say nothing,

barely thirteen, blank as the day.

You were to keep an eye on her

breathing, her little bones heaving,

and your eyes scan figurines, mementos

on the windowsill — Little Bo Peep has lost

her head — and green fields through the window:

hay barns, small farms, a chicken battery shed.

Rows upon rows of chickens.

There was a funnel hung from a gibbet

that swung like a big steel conical conundrum

above their dun feathers — the color

of your grandmother’s tights scrumpled on the floor.

Even a year before, she would have swooned

for shame at the sight of those tights half-trailed

under her bed, their crinkled wee ankles

jouking out, as if they had crawled under

and tipped their wrinkled cargo into the void — 

your grandmother in bed, waiting for the spoon.

Her weak breath does not reach heaven

but hazes among the chipped figurines,

the dull color television’s black screen,

fading flesh-colored flowers on the wall-

paper, dun as the wings of those dirt-crusted

rows upon rows of throbbing chickens.

When you dropped one into the funnel

its head pushed through that blood-rimmed O

to stare chicken-eyed at the other side,

blackened numbles and giblets

upon which it would soon stream

like warm port, its feet still in a fidget.

What gets passed on, through generations?

Your grandmother tries to speak. Her bony

fingers clutch your hand — and you bend

your head down. But you’d get more sense

from the sea in a seashell as your father

enters the room beaming, Well! Well?