Field Dressing

No one ever forgets that ripe maggot smell
of entrails laid on your fingers, the blood-steam
rising to cling like weightless, sleet-bright seeds.
But here earth hides its usual electric, small
heart, lungs, liver refusing the stiffened host
whose eye, stunned, deflates like the broken air sac
of the sister fucked under flies at a foreign wall.
No crop’s touch and no planet-like gold pellets.
The bony foot, one spur, belies practiced heat
in your mistress, eating, her nipples like wing-nubs.
Remember your hooked nail worming where quail calls
start, the leached childhood field you longed to hunt?
Soft grass for bed, creamed skin, scented sweet cake.