Animals

As the extinguished.

As creatures, coming out to play

in the twilight of creation

human faces intelligent and suffering,

turned upward entering the trees.

The charismatic megafauna:

polar bears, moose, rippling massive flanks

to shake loose biting flies.

The fox and the vixen. The leopard

dazzling in his camouflage, breaking

the urgent glass. In the underlayer

of  humus and moss and broken clay

the cryptogams, the earthworms turning

between the wizardly fingers

of the forest, managed growth

of the second order, the third, steered

toward what shoal, a history

for the benefit of imaginary extrinsic persons.

In the branches snowy owls

and ravens, or the rock pigeons we call

pigeons, that can’t perch in trees, that swarm cities

like the flying rats they are, hungry,

iridescent at the neck like the

rats themselves shining like a collar

at the base of a public sculpture

monument to the fundamental flight

through corridors of power, mathematics,

heat death rippling like an invisible wave

down State Street, paralleling Michigan,

pushed by the restless concinnations

of  the El, cutting longitudes across the lake itself,

desert of water

meeting the migrations of alien carp and

cosmic rays, diving deep for the wreck

of the Edmund Fitzgerald

or swimming invisible lines, boundaries

policed by radar, from Canada

a mass of air launched by minute variations

in temperature, push and pull over heat

islands, carbon dioxide absorption,

ozone exhaustion invisible and intervening

like a god: that which manifests

through its action on substance, not itself

substance: weak forces, atmospheres,

unnamed unmet animal species

gone extinct, whole genuses, phyla,

unknowable kingdoms and principalities,

coral reefs burned black like

the crouched and burdened angels,

muscular sketches of our vacancy

as in an etching by Blake, horizontal,

the spiritual body

dividing like a hyphen the upper from the lower,

phatic messenger of  betweenness,

inhuman round eyes fixed on nothing, on suffering,

folly, sporting events, on Gaza — 

wings outstretched to bandage the eyes of  Heaven,

our eyes

as they would bandage the wound of a headless child

or conceal the strength of a people

from their weakness, the mortals

masquerading as their own fates, individuals

slashed open by solitude, acts of mourning

and revenge, writing themselves

into the text of righteousness. The messengers

reveal nothing, like the animals

marching slowly toward me now, two by two,

tongues lolling, eyes lit from within hollow and sparkling

as a cave concealed from light for thirty thousand years

but concealed no longer. Grace have I none

but what can be inferred

by arms opening, palms, head tilting back

to catch rain in my jaws:

what is born, now, what wrests its way

out of the eternal feminine, the body

my only warrant, against monuments my pledge

to the immaculate moment. What is born

is not of me, or the we, or of god, or animals.

It is a wing. It is bleeding.

It masks my eyes until the thunder comes

to open the openness over all.