Come join the family darks
who graduated the public schools, skulls dilated 
as large as exotic house plants. So
far everything in life has grown from 
seed, watering. There has been bitterness, too, 
in the night, nights of too many 
stark tears, the darkness a peculiar
skittering, skittering in the ceiling—
shy as a vanishing fawn; dark the fabled tree 
where a stillborn baby was buried 
dark in a shoe box somewhere back
that you have heard rumored since 
a marvelous family get together when Uncle Lee 
drank so much he took a pee
         and out of his piss sprang the first flowers of spring.

But if someone who was nobody’s brother or
sister’s favorite foolish foil sisterly meddled 
in the middle of a fabulous story, inces-
tuous inbreeding, stolen kisses beneath
flowering trees, animal gropings in the hay, 
shit, mush, pig crust underneath the straw, 
a mouth twisted in disgust like a backwards cap,
he would be handed a gravedigger’s shovel
unwashed from a throwaway pile and pointed 
in a dark direction; he would be told
—sorry, they whispered and gestured, see—
to do the job that was too dark for you or me.