SARCOPHAGUS

That’s dead pigeon on the translucent
Ice-blue toe of my daughter’s jelly.
She kicked the bird by accident
As we crossed a cobbled alley
And she nearly cried
Before she could carry on:
How did it die?
Is that its beak? Where is its mom?
Is she sad? Can I take it home?
Then my turn: Can you say ‘carrion’?”
She sang it, wrong, until we reached the light,
Then, as “Walk” flashed at us, she got it right.

Columbus Avenue might have been the Rubicon:
But for a blood-blue smudge, the bird was gone—
Wrapped in a surplus
Word, a sarcophagus,
My way of saying “Hello” and “Fuck
You” to death in dead language. But at the park: “Yuck,
Daddy, can you wipe this off?” Two kids say she smells.
Helpless, hopeless Daddy-without-tissue tells
Her, as he holds her: “Honey, it’s not so bad.”
She says: “I smell like dead meat, Dad.”
So I dig a grave of cool, wet sand,
Resolved to rub the scent away by hand.

The grave’s a small but useful place—
Fits like a glove. The sand I take from it
I use as grit
So nearly liquid, putrid tears
Wept from the tread of her plastic sole
Fall back into the hole.
She makes the face of grief: “Dad, carrion stinks.”
Wisdom beyond her years.
When I let her go
There’s an ink-blue trace left on her toe
And the scent is on my hands, to be sure,
But I know no carrion got on her.