If I try to say this is a mother, devouring one of her curd-brained girls,
the world will shake and turn from me, so like the figure
of Cronos as she snuffs out the maidenliest star
that ever graced the birth of Troy. At thirteen
I could've said it was him, a father pistol-whipped,
chucked-up into his auntie's clenching, out-pushed gall,
every fiber felt, every hamstring wrested from a throat
as it croaks first sound, the bleat of the tribe cast into a morass
of gloating, blue-blood heart and hands all spindled
into catatonic maw, all fire-storm mouth-wrenching spasm
of love and malediction, we kids the marzipan
he tongued at Easter. He's sobbing now--all the fathers are,
the whites of their eyes a froth of banana meringue,
the semen-lash across a pithy, hundredth house of history.
Not Blake's Satan, not the choleric king of Planet X
with bleeding rings for eyes, not vengeant Marduk
as he gorges on his mother's ribs; here she's
the unhouseled slackless naked Yawn, hidden in savaged
thighs of azabache-stone. O salt-sweat caves of Altamira,
that first botched music of ouroboros, issue
like green phlegm from her loins,
each shell and coinage child of the single thrush-
note Spanish howl that Lorca knew so well.
Blind old Rodrigo digs his shit hole by himself:
this clay child is my father, son, and lover as one.