She hefts her choice
in textbook perfect hands,
hugs it to her like a tiny sister,
as I rummage for payment.
Giving a fiver to the woman
my hand meets two
stumps, one bearing

a thumb, a lithe thumb
which, even as it volunteers
a vestige of normality, is
monstrous, amplifies the smooth
pestle-like
otherwise inarguable finality
of the farmer’s arms.

She has been carven, at least
in the way a wayward log might be
sized to fit a hearth’s narrow cause,
or some beast, sacrificed—
the thumb, like Ishmael, alone escaped
or left there to rub in, over the years,
the hatefulness. I think

of those hands falling like small cobs
in an Asian field somewhere, she
pressing the stems of her arms
to her belly to save at least
her blood, its lavish rouge
twinned incalculably
by the man’s neckerchief, sweatsoaking.

Her face today is crinkly, pleasant, as old perhaps
as mine. While I filed for CO in ‘72, she
did the staggering run up to the killing fields.
She calculates, explores for change,
wrists stirring her apron pocket,
thick spoons in a cauldron.
I know where Piper’s eyes look

and dread explaining, then realize
even if I knew whatever atrocity
was truth, I need not tell it.
She’s unable to imagine
anything but accident or sad nature,
horror limited to the small witches soon
at our door, “scary,” and gross-out

masks the drugstore flaunts.
Little news. No history.
She is fallow to “truth.”
The woman levers out three
ones, hugging them
as she hugged her arms back then
and – hands them is not right –

offers me the bills.
At home tonight she will know
she’ll never know
as she stirs her children’s hair
how soft and light it feels
to her husband’s fingers
combing through it.

She will stroke with skin over bone
his face and perhaps remember
her nails against his back,
how he felt
to hold.
. . . Whether bearing it in hands or heart,
my daughter and I bring this harvest home.

Now from the observation deck halfway up St. Paul’s,
from which London flowed
lava-like in all directions, sun-shot
and hazy, we spiraled down hardwood steps,
537, like maple seedlings toward terra firma,
past grafittoed names knifed into stucco
two, three hundred years ago,
stairs buffed, darkened, eroded
by generations of feet, the pious or curious.

Through occasional windows like arrow slits
the city revealed itself but we were encased
in the entrails of history. We continued
to the crypt, cool and oddly
bright to help us see the residents
beneath, behind, stone slabs incised
with names and dates like the walls,
with lore, with epitaphs. Henry Moore,
his plaque as angled and unMoore-like
as the rest, Samuel Johnson, Bulwer-
Lytton, the great Turner at our feet
and back, and back, to Blake,
bust black, globe-pated and pugnacious.

Until well warmed, parched, awed,
we gravitated to the crypt café
where across from the tea dispenser
a great placard served as tombstone
for those who’d lain here before the first
cathedral fell in the Great Fire.
Including--holy crow!--King Ethelred,
died 1016. It sank in
as we chewed our sandwiches, absorbing
the ancient holy space transmogrified

to museum. We bought our postcards
and replicas of Roman coins and exited
into the blast of summer London, the stink
of tourist buses. The priest intoned
as the door shut
about this week’s Iraqi deaths, the Sudanese,
the war, wars, never far despite the lessons
we should have learned since Ethelred ruled.

We wished for peace, change
as incremental, imperceptible as the bending
of all those sturdy stairs to the persistent
will of foot after foot after patient foot.