Asylum

My life becomes too hard, so I go away.
A couple near Turlock takes me in,
not because they like me,

but they like the good my rent will do.
It's just the two and the woman's mother,
frail and shawled in black.

As spring heats into summer,
the old woman comes to call me "son,"
for we have both lost sense of home.

At meals they barely feed her,
give her the smallest cuts of meat,
mostly fat, and a few red drops of wine.

They do not speak.
She convinces me they want to kill her--
"Neglect is only the beginning."

One afternoon, outside their farmhouse,
we sit on crates and smell yams
swelling in the warm earth.

I ask her why she lives like this,
but she says nothing, only smiles,
grabs a chicken, and wrings its neck,

then pulls out its innards,
showing me the freshly eaten grain
inside the dark gizzard.

She frowns at my silence, as if to say,
"There is a lesson here,
but you do not understand it yet."

Later, as the moon begins its nightly rounds,
she leads me a little ways from town,
to a tree clutching a fallen ax's running blade.

She says it was the tree that bit,
catching the axehead
and snapping the handle in two.

Come autumn,
she offers me the axe that lost its head,
and I go south to face my life.


Herman Fong