Annunciation Song

raise grief to music
–Louis Zukofsky

We populate earth and death in
an attempt to
inform humanity—
its scent, its sentence, its poetry.
And blessed be singers who sing
of man, woman and child, the antenna
of provocation,
an obsession of dust, among
wild bones…
The jaw drops.
You earn your vocabulary.
The arm beside me begins to open, burn.