today We heard Ten Utterances from G-d on Mt. Sinai! the ear is a labyrinth leading to the pineal gland. open it up! get enlightened!
***
The baby’s ear looks like a baby
I thought
:curved cartilage seems
a spine in seed;
that faceless lobe —
Except it was more like
a pickpocket’s opposite:
Spy drops we called them
:shoved secrets, in
parks, in the dark.
But those secrets were wanted.
She wasn’t, at first.
A crime, the Party always said
to bring children into this world.
So, guilty, sentenced, here I sit,
spooning her (and the floor) warm gruel
She meditates upon the fallen lumps
(although her stare’s more like a long-unrented room)
And I, upon her ear
Which as yet
is more like
an idea for an ear
:a sea glass question mark,
future perfect of the verb to be
Every night, my bed a ledge,
my body half-dissolved —
Shame — a fractured bone’s
cool heat —
tells me to tell, and to run
but where?
We call it the wrong side of History —
that uppercase pillory rune —
And who am I?
A pudding of a man.
A cross between a turnip and a toad
and born to die a fool —
What I had been fell from me like dirty rags
My daughter’s ear
:the fingerprint of God