I Owe a Cock to Asclepius

He moves among the chickens. He wears jeans, a v-necked white undershirt stained with the memory of work, and brown cowboy boots. The hens protest his presence with the din of their collected clamor. A jerking roiling mass of brown feathers, beaks and stuttering feet, punctuated here and then suddenly there with the lustrous gleam of a dark eye peering between the action to catch his. And he leans down to catch the chicken by the neck, and he rolls his hand in a sudden flick. Barely registering the dull snap of the vertebrae, the heave of the soft body as the life abruptly dissipates. Not lost in the languid motion from the veins or snuffed in the entrapment of the lungs, but like a brief flash of energy, a firefly’s lamp deep in a clump of weeds. There and then the next moment, lost. Life is different than you think. He culls for hours. He rolls the right and left wrists, freeing the birds of their burdens. He sets them in piles of fifteen. He sets ten piles of fifteen. His wrists hurt, the dull ache spreading back from the heel of his palm to his elbow, brightened by a shock of pain now and then. He sits in the grass away from the chicken house and the ten piles of fifteen. His shirt sticks to the sweat that spreads across his chest. The stains deepen. The sun stands overhead and he has been working since this morning.