When the corn gave,
a boy was sucked to the bottom
of the cement silo whose walls
he was paid almost nothing
to scrape clean with a steel pole.
It took thirty-five men to pull his body
from the outlet spout.
Corn had plugged his nostrils,
ears, and throat as far down
as his lungs. In the calf barn,
rescuers cleared the field
of his face, a few fistfuls of grain
a calf sluggishly ate
on its way out to pasture.
In the Iliad, the moment Dolon,
young, ugly, volunteered
to spy on the Argives when
no one else would, he was doomed
to have his weasel cap stripped
while his head rolled into a trench
darkened with other sons’ blood
where his mouth would slowly fill
with blades of grass.