At bloodletting. Our fathers are caught


on brambles and we owe them


Ourselves, our roots, our patrician


feature. We are fetched for a lesson of cardboard


and spores.


As usual, dogs follow.


Lately our hands are cast from metal.


Only the lamps, upon dissection, answer.


This youth we arch toward (every


midnight silver blades shift).


Our fathers, the books


of cosmonauts—


mornings in a case and a kind


of tweed, we fast at a diner of slit light.