Tell a Sad Story Here to Get Food

When you get to the house at the end of the lane,
where the crows know that the sky comes to an end,
and where the road is just wide enough to accommodate two tired feet,
where the thought of a forest becomes a real and scary forest in front of you,
tell the woman there how much rain you had to swallow not to drown,
tell all of the women in that woman you find there on her front step
about the night wind becoming a tiger that feasted on you,
about how the wind at night is always hungry for your skin,
and that no matter how hard you looked into the eyes of that tiger
it would not look back into your eyes even though it could see you;
tell that woman you find there how the road’s dust, its permanent dirt
is almost everything that your worried mind is able to remember
and that it turned into dancing devils right in the middle of all the daylight,
and that the reason that your legs are still working and still strong
is because you’ve had to learn how to outrun the dirty ghosts,
and how every reflected star at night would turn into a will-o’-the-wisp
that watched the one eye you’ve always had to keep open as you slept;
talk about how God would sometimes pretend that he was impossible,
that he was a needle in a hurricane full of yellow haystacks;
tell that woman, as she hangs her clothes in the sun while staring at you,
how long it’s been since you didn’t have to take into account
the weight of the night upon your body wherever you slept;
tell her that you once saw an afternoon sky, dark and full of all the rain,
divide into two, and in the space in between, in the distance,
you saw God get up on his feet, put on a coat and leave the room of the world.
Tell this; tell this sad story about all of the sad stories
that have somehow survived all this time inside the prison of you
and she will take you by the arm into her quiet morning kitchen,
where a fat, golden cat on the floor will look up at you
as though you have answers, as though you have some love to give,
and there you will sit down and rest, and eat.