Lyrics

He told me how, after soft afternoons teaching logarithms and waving away the blackboard's hieroglyphics with a damp cloth he'd return home to the sweet methane of the chicken sheds. How he'd change from his suit into overalls and how he dug his hand deep into the bucket to draw out a leaking fist, which he opened, a sail of grain unfurling to the birds beneath. And how later that same hand would flatten to find a way through the dark under the sleeping weight of a hen, to bring out, like a magician whose tricks are just the way of things, one egg, warm and bald in his brown palm