They have no language for what they all become.

Sunday School notwithstanding, there’s no language

for their sliding.  Church clothes change to gravestone rubbings,

stained by red clay, grass, detritus plenicolor.

Darwin in abeyance, they’re fish by the bottom,

beyond instruction or parental admonition.

They dream fish dreams of tractable ooze, deep weeds, light

streaming, chiaroscuro, from the surface, while down

deeper, gathered round a dead aerator, catfish,

pike, alligator gar imagine cut banks, oxbow

lakes, the privacy of first cigarettes, darkness

presaging lightning strikes at dim fry in the shallows,

stirred silt, the violence, satisfactions

separate and singular.  But parents tempt

with donuts, attendance stickers.   Coaxed up the bank,

their reds, greens, fade beneath the hands of spit-shining

moms, pant-dusting, impatient dads. They shrug against

improvement, slouch audacity.  They fidget with

their families throughout the service, awaiting

their first communion.  The body and blood of Christ,

they’re told, these splashes of grape juice, these stale crackers.

Not enough.  They can’t say how they know, but they must,

that such is a greyhound’s rabbit, an edging, not

the downward slide into the dark miraculous.