The turkey’s strung up by one pronged foot,the cord binding it just below the stiff trinityof toes, each with its cold bent claw. My eyesare in love with it as they are in love with alldead things that cannot escape being looked at.It is there to be seen if I want to see it, as myfather was there in his black casket and could notelude our gaze. I was a child so they askedif I wanted to see him. “Do you want to see him?”someone asked. Was it my mother? Grandmother?Some poor woman was stuck with the job.“He doesn’t look like himself,” whoever-it-wasadded. “They did something strange with his mouth.”As I write this, a large moth flutters againstthe window. It presses its fat thorax to the glass.“No,” I said, “I don’t want to see him.” I don’t recallif I secretly wanted them to open the box for mebut thought that “no” was the correct response,or if I believed I should want to see him but wastoo afraid of what they’d done with his mouth.I think I assumed that my seeing him wouldmake things worse for my mother, and she was allI had. Now I can’t get enough of seeing, as if I’m payinga sort of penance for not seeing then, and sothis turkey, hanged, its small, raw-looking head,which reminds me of the first fully naked manI ever saw, when I was a candy striperat a sort of nursing home, he was a war veteran,young, burbling crazily, his face and body redas something scalded. I didn’t want to see,and yet I saw. But the turkey, I am in love with it,its saggy neck folds, the rippling, variegatedfeathers, the crook of its unbound foot,and the glorious wings, archangelic, spreadas if it could take flight, but down,downward, into the earth.