Makers

He runs calloused hands
over the flanks of a ship, a horse,
a bitch, his son’s cheek, a rock—
face, plucks the blade of his knife
(the one his father left him, left by his father—
I don’t know how many killers back—
his grandmother actually kept the thing
like a scepter—wept when she
gave it him—and he only six). That’s
how he touches anemones, never
picks them. I always pick,
put them in cups. That’s how he runs
his hands over me, absently, or
like a blindman who knows the door
is to the left, or as though praying,
or as he blesses the throat before cutting,
when his beautiful hands flower
with blood. He holds the thing down
ever so tenderly, its legs kicking,
just as he holds me when we mate, for
I, too, kick.

Wherever he goes, he says, he makes
things happen—ships, poems, monuments,
sons, women—especially women and sons.
He forgets I, too, am a maker,
and I don’t mean of cup-cakes and tapestries.
I mean maker of covenants, maker of words.
He’ll never forgive I made men
of my suitors, but flaunts decalogues,
thou shalt, thou shalt not.
What order? What laws?
His ancestors’? The mess he left me with?
The tears and blood in his wake?
My sons? My milk-skinned, my almond-eyed
killers?