Toth Farry

In the back of the charm-box, in a sack, the baby canines and incisors are mostly chaff, by now, split kernels and acicular down, no whole utensils left: half an adz; half a shovel, in its broken handle a marrow well of the will to dig and bite. And the enamel hems are sharp as shell-tools, and the colors go from salt, to bone, to pee on snow, to sun on pond-ice embedded with twigs and chipped-off skate-blade. One cuspid is like the tail of an ivory chough on my grandmother's what-not in a gravure on my mother's bureau in my father's house in my head, I think it's our daughter's, but the dime Hermes mingled the deciduals of our girl and boy, safe- keeping them together with the note that says Dear Toth Farry, Plees Giv Me A Bag of Moany. I pore over the shards, a skeleton-lover—but who could throw out these short pints of osseus breastmilk, or the wisdom, with its charnel underside, and its dome, smooth and experienced, ground in anger, rinsed in silver when the mouth waters. From above, its knurls are a cusp-ring of mountain tops around an amber crevasse, where in high summer the summit wildflowers open for a day—Crown Buttercup, Alpine Flames, Shooting-Star, Rosy Fairy Lantern, Cream Sacs, Sugar Scoop.