An Example

Where can the dead hope

to stash some part

of themselves, if not in the living?

And so when I had a daughter,

I gave her your name.

She does not use it.

She goes by a silly, other

thing she was called once in fun,

and then often enough

that it stuck. But oh her hideous pill-

eyed toys — to them each, she has given

her given name,

and so it is you

I hear her again and again calling to.

It is your name she shrieks

to the bale-head farmer, the woven

goat, the cop made of buttons and rags.

Your name, to the squat gray

dog on wheels, tipping on its side

as she drags it by a red string.

That dog, always prone

and pulled along, as though constantly

being killed and paraded

through town to make an example.

What did it do — 

Whatever it did, don’t do it.