The guinea hen of Manalapan
has a wattle like a turkey, but cut short.
Her feathers have spots like streaked paint.

This vast meandering flat-bottomed gully
much smaller than a valley, with a hump
of rock spined all its length is home to—what,

Musk is a scent derived from a deer gland
that resembles a human scrotum
and thousands of years ago, in Sanskrit,

The mind, tossing, tosses out new sounds,
or the same sounds thought different, continually,

They grew in our backyard, the Bartlett and the Gestler
and though now I know trees aren’t sexual like us,
I didn’t know what sexual meant, I only knew what all five-year-olds knew,