Before I watched you die, I watched the dying falter, their hearts curled and purring in them like kitfoxes asleep beside their shadows, their eyes pawed out by the trouble of their hunger. I was humbling, Lord, like the taxidermist's apprentice. I said yes, and amen, like the monk brushing the barley from the vealcalf's withers, the heft of it as it leans against his cilice. Winter, I have watched the lost lie down among their bodies, clarified as the birdsong they have hymned of. I have heard the earth sing longer than the song. Come, I said, come summer, come after: you were the bull-elk in the moonlight of my threshold, knocking off the mosses from its antlers before it backed away, bewildered, into foliage. You were thin-ribbed, were hawk- scarred, were few. Yes, amen, before I heard you giving up your singing, you were something stumbling hunted to my open door; you were thinning with the milkweed of the river. Winter, Wintering, listen: I think of you long gone now through the valley, scissoring your ancient way through the pitch pines. Not waiting, but the great elk in the dark door. Not ravens where they stay, awhile, in furor, but the lost thing backing out among the saplings, dancing off the madness of its antlers. Not stone, not cold stone, but fire. The wild thing, musk-blooded, at my open door, wakening and wakening and wakening, migrations in the blindness of its wild eyes, saying Look at them, look at how they have to. Do something with the wildness that confounds you. Copyright © 2017 Joseph Fasano. Used with permission of the author. |
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