Not of bones or humiliations we lie with
thankful for the alarm of another day,
but of the squirrel who found her way
into the tube feeder, sought black oilers,
their seedy scent, the way the apple
in its sun-glow, tempted Eve. Pungent
apple-scent like the scent
of Adam himself, his skin, his hair,
maybe now I’ve gone too far, but isn’t
that what the squirrel sought there
in the feeder I filled, I hung?
Her clever mind figured the lid off,
reckoned a way to the manna there,
the way the man whose elbow rested
confident on his knee as he flicked
ashes from his cigarette, whose music
lined his walls alphabetically, whose love
of mysteries pulled me from my marriage
into a conduit of seed, no
consciousness of how deeply the tube
held food or what might be at the end—
no end at all. Dug in, I consumed
my way to the bottom, found myself
trapped. She died there. Suffocated.
When all she wanted was to be fed.
