End of century, February thaw, horse stalls of a Delancey cul-de-sac
on Sunday afternoon. This subfloor crawlspace leads straight
to salt-flat estuaries of Brighton Beach, to the world
my littlest brother, who lives for haggis and blood-pudding,
shares with me. We shovel potash and horse shit days,
stocking root cellars moonlit nights: green onions, fat cabbage,
bean sprouts, springes and woodcocks. Suddenly there's
wind-up clocks in every Scots-Irish home but ours.
We pay out sod with lime and nickel: below an opium den,
our porker Rose is burnished gold. She snuffles lemon peel
and devilled egg, nests in the lath and cotton batting
below a brand-new Bilco door. She grubs for sand ants,
half a brain of broccoli, tubers and tulip roots,
an honorary member of our race -- one that proscribes
the ascent of man. Take note of a cheap-pearled parasol
left by a landlord, and the metastisizing wad of fucking rat.
Here the mind's at home, below a frozen terracotta,
below the quare gunk surface of a dream, a politics of greed,
just as vegetarians march up Orchard Street, with a giant gherkin
in a spokey pram. The sham's that anything at all has changed:
Rose grunts and pees in sawdust, turns to her curds and whey.

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