First Circle

By Srikanth Reddy Srikanth Reddy

It’s dark in here, the dark inside of a man

in the dark. It’s not night. One hears crows

overhead, dawn fowl caws, the shod soles again

treading their sunlit plots above. One grows

dotish-fond of such things. Long live the things,

their ways, their roots pushed goatish & gray

through the skull, in this earth that gaily spins

though one has crossed its smutted green threshold

to reign in a crate. We have done no wrong,

my friends, & yet we find ourselves soiled,

sold, carbonized teeth in a moss-riven jaw.

Once I sat on a stool as my grandmother told

me of heaven. She cleaned fish for our living. I saw

how her rusty black knife unseamed the sunset

in each belly—coral, ochre, carmine, raw,

lice-infested sunsets in a pail. So many nights.

Night in the kitchen shack, night at the crumbling edge

of our milk-pond province, a blade, lone cricket

raving in the lawn.

Source: Facts for Visitors (University of California Press, 2004)