Molesting the Legend

TRAVIS BLANKENSHIP

Criss-crossed over a calendar of Sundays, unsuspecting,

lazy days of partly cloudy and windy, sunny hours,

a team of adolescent seers scours the muddy pavement

of thatched river roads, where the people

who watch animals’ curing pelts

morph into paychecks on telephone poles

take no heart in magical occurrences

beyond the still-existent fur trade.

There the young seers gather squirrel bones in a chitterlings

bucket they

carry between them. With femurs and vertebrae,

the children erect skeleton towers

until the collected remains are used,

and a city of roadkill or natural causes

sprawls down the dirty street.

Whole fields of ants begin

to populate the wobbling structures

as they strip the structures

to the beams of bone, cleave the carrion fragments.

But the ants pour. They pile

and confine their metasoma in a poisonous mess,

yet the Tiresias clan jeer and dance along

their new city’s limits even when

the basement of legs and mandibles gives out

and crushed ant carapaces ooze from the squirming statue

like wet concrete. Mothers soon come

with brooms and dustpans to clear the prediction—

the way gypsies cover their trochomancy—

and free themselves of both trespass and certainty.