POEMS
INHERITANCE AND DESCENT
o
once when I was merely
The music of a passage,
The letters of a text,
My father loved me dearly,
And grew me from my grass age
Until my legs were sexed.
Rains wet his manuscript.
The notes fell from the staves,
The letters ran like waters,
Paternal music dripped,
My grass fell into graves.
I shall descend in daughters.
Clock in the blood, slow ticker,
Drown me in your dark sea.
Tide in whose arms flesh strives,
In eyes where fathers flicker
Make me more blind than thee,
Divide me among my wives.
After the skull-capped scholars,
Scatter me among women
In harems of winding hair,
Who clothe them in my dollars.
And lay me there, man brimming
Amid their golden stare.
Walter Stone
