Jolia Einstein
untitled

My father's father built chicken-coops
for years, my father inside each of them
collecting the eggs before dawn.

A small boy, gripping his own elbows,
cradles these shelled stones like ancient pearls,
in the crease between his forearms and his chest.

From the coops, he understood to build barns,
from the barns to our house on a hill overlooking
a town of homes with fathers and mothers and children.

If I were to find him, tonight,
asleep on his back, his arms would rest
folded across his rising chest.

If I were to raise his bed upright,
I would see before me a doorway,
this same small boy nesting in the dark.

And if I were to raise his eyelids, his pupils
like dark yolks turned toward his mind,
I would face his oblong whites.

It is in these two boiled wombs,
vein-held and warm, that he has birthed
secret rising suns.

Back to Issue 2, 1999