Bull’s Head for a Lyre

—for the Second Amendment

Someone in Mesopotamia put a false beard on a bull eight bull-headed lyres buried with royals at Ur the Metropolitan Museum tells me that these lyres played songs of praise irreplaceable for private amusement conquering armies felt the wind from strumming fingers

I stole a tuning text once from a museum, it was four thousand years old a bull smashed its lips against a fence to get fed the only lyres that survived were coated in metal like the bronze bulls this blackened bull has lazuli hair locks lyres with bull heads had the lowest tones in a petting zoo a bull bucked and scared my sister lyres had names like lady, and the red-eyed lord at the site in Iraq one of the players had an arm over her lyre she told me to stay sharp and took off the bull ornament my dress shoes are made of leather oxtail is delicious sometimes my bed draws me in with a curious depression in my dream a bull with a dent in its neck raises its head online cattle advice says that the hand-fed calf is the bull that’s going to kill you, you are supposed to let the mother raise it

My mother told me to stay away from Alabama because of the racists, I go there anyway women smoothed the bulls’ manes, yoked strings made from cow gut I dream about basic training in a field soaked in cloud there are liquid brown eyes in the dirt between the lady ferns A man with a beautiful neck asks me why I joined the military she joined the military and left her family the percussion of shovels the one he hands me is shorter than the ones in the news

I once felt a bull’s taut nose with my thumb and the swelling sweat aroused me there’s no other ornament but the bite of heat when my friend from the Air Force asked if I had ever fired one

I was sitting at a thin desk wearing the hair of a bull first time she punctured herself was in sixth grade down the scope he smiles, says to focus in high school Red Bull sparked off my tongue they buried the lyre players with the queen because you stroke a bull anywhere except the forehead on the field of air a bull ran down someone’s sweaty back running in the mornings is a training ritual once I came over the crest of a hill and my heel cracked on the horn of a bull the metal runs back from the burst like music

Then we took it apart and put in solvent and oil there’s an ancient song about a bull who ran down everything he saw and more sweat wrapping around his flanks like oil

that time a bull lifted in a machine for its neck the day a bull ran down even its own breath