Supply Chain

Drippingly by grips, this humus and perlite nearly sings

through my fingers

circling the ditch lily’s heat-sunk side, anthers frayed, fallen.

Sift. Learn your footprint.

If occasion, rise to. Another bloom, opposite, grows blood

orange its splayed

open hand, in shade, still opulent, curls tender, having the time

of its life.

Let’s get the basics, the survey says. Sight says, turning,

the cat’s sprawled

besides the baby rat it found and above the scalp thin lawn

through the window

the children are watching. Where do you live? What’s under your

roof? What brushes

up, by now, is summer burnt grass in scorch and stubble with

the rat who will not

move. Lent pallor. Light gray lumpen weight. How many rooms

do you own? Keep

digging, mom, get to china, they call out, when I work the plant

free, its dirt

tumbling thick with rooted tendrils reaching. Are you a gadget

geek, a regular

joe, or technophone? Plus crumbs, wedged in pine cones,

tunnels,

earthworm ruts. There’s nothing I can’t touch here if I want

to or disturb,

teeming sum of what we’re built on, soil damps beside dry

pockets, clay

at the spade end gone that unctuous apricot yellow. Refine

your results.

The cat’s long patient, knows what her hurt can do.

She waits, ginger

lines of her fur circling. What’s on your plate/

in your medicine

cabinet/jewelry box/garage? I look closer. The infant rodent

is trembling.

Another child, not mine, labors deep to find the shine,

sorting pebbles

through her fingers. Make progress. Take action.

Witness

not permitted distance. When the prey finally moves,

jumps a few inches, the cat

closes in, takes the injured flaccid thing into his jaws

for the kill

and carries it almost like a kitten across the lawn.

My hand crushes

the dark stamens and the littlest child

upstairs

at the rat’s last squeal, begins to scream best,

best, this

is the best day of my life, and I have to walk back inside.