For Betty
My veins, passionate and simple as the church
where you were shaothraigh.
This is your hellish dirge
in the only tongues I know. Did your
king ever come
mounted on that donkey? And have you
been to London
to visit the queen who is also dead?
You scoffed when I left teaching to
work on farms, almost
panicked at the thought of regression,
or a ghost
From Hacks Cross, where all of the
irises were copper and red.
A goat song is tongue and glottis. The
barred owl who cooks
For you
made spaghetti and Gregory choked at the round wood
Table. Get it out, Get it out. I
was shouldered by the ungulate Mabel,
where just across the field, a lean to,
or, unfinished stable,
For an underperforming bronco, or,
barren mare.
Whinny, the words wouldn’t form. Your
mother was a Powers.
Your frustrated grunts, Adamic in the
tower
A mighty rushing wind of the throaty
prayer.
Lisa, Lisa and
Larry had a little lamb, the lamb
Of Germantown, or was it you that
bodyslammed
me into the already spent goldenrod,
that vernal pool
with the spermatophore. Those
ambystomatids that loyally
Return. We never once spoke of poetry.
And here I am with you, passing off my
hinny as a mule.
It is like pulling teeth, to creep over
a long line, but for
you, I will invoke the ethic, though
the surname was Po’er,
Either one from Picardy, or, from the
Old French povre.
I know which one you ascribed, my
sacred and stuffed dove.
When I am seven, I wear my boots on my
hands and gallop
across the kitchen floor to your lap,
break out in Babel
You, too, wanted to be the prize horse
and the hardscrabble.
That your voice was a lilt, grouler,
poesies, ponies, stable.
Katherine Duckworth is a poet from Tennessee.
She is the author of Mexia (Roseffern), The Soda Can Forever (Roseffern), and Slow Violence (Beautiful Days).
