Lambs

Kneeling at the fence and reaching through,
you lay your hands upon the lambs.

Never this close before, their sinlessness
is in you now, flowing like a current 

from fingertip to fingertip, radiating 
from deep beneath the virgin fleece, 

and your life feels suddenly criminal,
suddenly wolfish, somehow, clothed in their wool.

Nothing that you’ve lived through 
has prepared you to believe in harmlessness, 

that any gaze could be this devoid of purpose, 
that such surrender, such lack of want 

was ever possible, and now, faced with the lambs,  
you begin to sob as though helpless, 

the faint lines of turquoise, the veins at your temples, 
flooding quietly with their blood.