October

This is the season in which the lambs begin

to die, in which the boy in his red and blue plaid

shirt gets down on his wrists and his knees to crawl

into the moorland at night and spread a cross of pumice

on their foreheads, in which he reads to them a hymn

like a freighter burning with a cargo of ripened fruit

because in the morning he will have to kill them.

Because in the morning he will wake to find his father

standing in the hall like a horse with a lamp in its mouth

and he will have to wade into a river with only that silence

in his arms, and he will harm them. Because every year

I watch him stand at the threshold of a season and begin

to call them, to hold the ruined bodies of the dead

with only a dim chord of flame between his lips

and to touch them, to touch them

and to be with them, to touch them

and to sing with them, the way a child

touches everything, with the hand of his murderer.