"Provider" by Dan Rosenberg

Dan Rosenberg | Bassinet | Carnegie Mellon University Press | 2022 | 104 Pages

Provider

Sometimes, friend, a mountain is legible as air,
and sometimes the dust whispers to the crops
its sultry blues—or is it a dirge? Sometimes 

it’s hard to tell what’s a firefly and what’s 
a forest fire. All you know for sure 
is this cricket, how she side-steps the shovel, 

leaping deeper into the darkened garage. 
To die, maybe, under a crooked yardstick 
notched with years of height. What a future 

you try to clever your way into, like a crow
with a pitcher of pebbles. What hot oil freckles
your arms with scars that say provider. Cough up 

your delicate bones; they won’t hold
you upright, and you’re no owl deciding
what can be a part of you or not. Sometimes 

the laws have loopholes where too many
fingers have worried them away. Or maybe 
they were made like that, careless as a lawnmower 

shaking a ground wasp nest. Sometimes it’s hard 
to tell a citrus grove from a circuit board, 
but here’s the place to sacrifice your son. 

Here’s a ram, tangled in a bramble. And I’m 
over here, finger in nose, holding this ass 
by the reins, watching a wide blue nothing stretch 

across the sky. Sometimes, friend, you hold 
the knife. And sometimes, under a silence of wings
and empty light, the knife just won’t be held.

Dan Rosenberg, “Provider” from Bassinet.
Copyright © 2022 by Dan Rosenberg.
Reprinted with the permission of Carnegie Mellon University Press.
www.cmu.edu/universitypress