Bloodroot

Photographs, fragile as Dead Sea scrolls, hold two of you, dead before my birth, stiff in sienna spring, serious as scabbards on south Missouri farm. Rosie: wind-hard in rock-scrubbed black dress, stooped with thirteen children, steel-haloed glasses glinting plum sun, aureole sun-gravured face, dried apple forehead skewered with string. Abraham: family myth namesake squinting beyond musk ox moustache, blanched brow, measuring Etruscan manhood, those pale stone radish seeds sown years ago, the calloused hard-silk lover's hands swinging slowly at your sides, butchered hogs sashaying trees.