Elegy For The Odd, Where It Drains, Where It Ends

This blood is odd and good
and comes from what is dead:

necks hacked or sawed-off into buckets
that we keep in the shed

for this last task before all
the animals are done for the fall

and the rest of the year.
Sometimes we drain the chickens's blood

into the wild dill
that grows behind the fence.

Does that blood follow veins
in the ground all the way

to the root? Does it drain
into groundwater? Why can't we taste

it—there's so much we haul
off to the soil and out into the aqueduct

our fathers made behind the shed
to carry all the blood away

that we don't give to the dill.
Otherwise the racoons get it,

eyes lit and glittering
in the evening, raucous Sinatras

among the cans we try to bungee closed.
I put a tiny daisy bud

in a test tube, send it down the trough
which we never followed long enough

to find out where it ends,
where our fathers' hands have made

it end—in sewer grates,
or illegally into the streets

in the middles of nights
where kids see it drain

And think murder, possibility,
guilt, and sin and sing.

Copyright © 2005 Ander Monson All rights reserved
from The Kenyon Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission