Lambs

Lambs

Eating lamb, I remember the lambs
We had for a time. Their mothers were nothing
But trouble but our dad thought we boys
Would enjoy the lambs, which is just what
The waiter said after setting down my plate.
I only remember them in winter, 
In their soft warm coats. I wonder now
Did a zipper zigzag under their bellies,
The slider tiny as a grain of rice,
By which, could we have found it,
We could have undressed them
Like they were our children, come in
To the warm house after playing in snow,
Revealing muscles that fit together
Like the continents of Pangea
On posters in geography classrooms,
Or those diagrams on the flyspecked walls
Of butcher shops, into which lines like arrows
Are stuck to identify the cuts. 
Had they been naked would we still have knelt
In fresh straw to embrace them, trying to place
Our red faces in the way of their black eyes?
(They never quite looked at us, as if
They could sense the intentions of our kind.)
Chewing, I see their flesh wrapped in fascia,
Their flayed heads small as those of newborn mice,
Their coats draped over the bar gate to dry.
Finished, I push my plate away.
This vision is what I ate.
The waiter has to ask twice if I’m finished.
I say I’m sorry and that I am. 
He doesn’t know that I’m not there,
That I left when he set my plate down
For the farm I grew up on in Illinois
To try and put a lamb back together.
I press the lost piece into the puzzle,
Then put her coat back on
So she stops shivering, lifting each leg
To put it through the sleeves, ears over ears,
Eyeholes over eyes, nose over nose.
Then I zip the whole thing up tight.
She walks away from me trembling,
Like someone who doesn’t quite trust
A ladder but climbs it anyway.
While paying the bill I kneel in straw
And gaze past the lambs into the barnyard.
Dead farmers are shearing sheep in heaven,
Snippets of fleece falling from a gray sky,
Dressing the butchered world in new wool.
But where on earth is the loom?