GOD’S CHROMOSOMES


What can a child know of the skin of daylight, its cell-work
        as fragrant
as lilac, warped pliant and soft

in his hand’s aimless twisting, the shape of the minutes,
        the body’s progressions,
    drifting, leaf bud and pollen, from the then-thriving

canopy of elm and willow?  He is everywhere in daylight
        a child of God.  God’s
chromosomes in starlight:  dug-up

worm lengths, bobs and lures, the four-pronged hooks
        his father gummed
    with catfish paste above the unchained river;

the sound of his voice and his voice’s echo
        the male part and
    the female part; his looking tugged thirty feet up

from a whirlpool . . .  To quell this vertigo:  the bows
of his muddied shoelaces
slung from their knots.  Later, in a night’s waking dream

of heaven—a dancer bent in a deliberate calisthenics—
the arms, scarves;
the legs, scarves; everywhere the unimpeachable music

humming its low fire governance.  A tattooing
        that made him rise
    squinting late Iowa mornings, his mother’s

younger brother beside him on the cool steps, flesh
        of his flesh, his own
    skin beside him, feral, electric.  What could a child know

of such division and grace?  To be crucified in the genes,
        to hang there—a boy
    in a man’s body—hrsh lght, Gds lght, faltring

ner th crwn of the skul, as if some fissure had been pinched,
        had been welded closed.
    Still, their voices threaded.  His uncle’s,

idiot savant, above his own, detailing by grillwork, by shape
of the hood, con-
figuration of tail lamp, all of creation, God’s work,

either (man/child) could be prepared to know:  the whir
        of traffic down 22nd Street:
    his uncle separating the Dodges from Chrys-

lers, Chryslers, irrefutably, from late model Pontiacs.