Poetry: Ray Succre

The lark is popped out its eye from a pellet gun
and what we know of two troubling boys,
each a transom over which an obscene thing
can surge into another.

At first they take up sticks and permit themselves learn
every collision of feathery flesh and wooden strike,
a dearth of clarified arm-talk,
their urges without owner or interminable clergy.

The odor of their bellies and armpits and breath a firm presence,
afternoon Sun degrading their civility to an unhygienic less:
a rankness and loathsome, animal transfiguration:
the stick swings into thin meat through their stink,
between the jambs of three and three-ten,
only to follow the bird’s beating in every hour of their life,
ever onward from a stony kill, and in time beat one another,
in time behind beards and worn nostrils,
the Summer and Fall behind the continuance of larks,
the anger and Earth’s relishing those pellets and sticks
that know the boys’ way.

All rights reserved to Ray Succre.