He meets a man with an icicle voice
who says it is ‘Mind’s disease’
to act impulsively; this man elevates
‘Reason’ to a pedestal, where he worships
at a cold, stony chiselled face, from afar
(& sometimes Peter sees him go up close, to peer,
at something old, cold, & slushy, underneath it –
which, he tells Peter, is a high I.Q.-ed
pickled brain, in a jar).
The cold man reads Peter, from his big,
darkblue worn-covered book, about the name ‘Peter’.\
Peter knows names are second-hand & jump
onto a rabbit’s back while she or he is asleep;
that rabbits wake up wearing names
they think are their own. He
doesn’t want anything to do
with some
of the people who’ve worn his
name before … that one    back in the
dark hole of time gone backwards …
twelfth
century Latin, Petrus, the book says, means ‘stone’
& the other, earlier one, … who gave the name
to a man called Simon, who then probably was
called that – even by his mother –
did she have to put ‘Saint’ in front of ‘Peter’
as the book says, even when she scolded him …
or when she told him to learn the list of DON’Ts?
When the man tells Peter
some of the other meanings – behind his name –
Peter guesses why    that one jumped onto him:
to run out    as a stream
or vein of ore    peters out; to fail,
die out, disappear … Peter knows
all about disappearing … Right now,
doing a bolt
down a burrow,
to get away from the cold man. Suddenly the burrow opens:
blue skies, pale green ears of wheat,
wavering above him. As he scrambles out, up through
the wheat roots he nibbles
a few whitish below-earth stems – in passing
just to test.
Now, either on fours or standing,
he cannot see over the wheat. The ground
under his paws feels flat. There is wheat
in every direction. Singing
voices he hears & the earth vibrates
with the trundling sounds of cart wheels.
He hops tentatively
towards the sounds of the voices …
It is eleven years to the year two thousand
in the Ukraine … Singing & dancing humans
are bringing in the wheat.
A girl tells Peter:
We have done this for hundreds of years.
Next year we
will not plant wheat, & we
will not eat    this harvest.
We are    one hundred & sixty k.
north of Chernobyl: this wheat
is death.