You Were an Ant Often
You were an ant often. Bear, snake, stickbug
Dressing the part, hissing, arching, moos
Day by day, a new phylum, moan. Life at play,
A perfect age of animal dream and certainty.
You were Skunk that raspberry picking eve
With Sun barely hanging on the farms’ outlay
You ambled uphill in black and white
Against winds sculpting the kettle moraine
I had coaxed you up the hill, though hungry,
Tired of the sticks, reduced to four-year-old eyes
Wanting to see what Papa says we could
Complaining up cold hill, in search of skunk
And then, sprawled across the awful path
Sure as black and white, but blurred
Fur and feathers, blackened blood and bones
Devoured by a great plains bird we wonder
You gasp: White rib bones warping, fur carried
To the winds. We smell: Bleak skunk carnage
Black and white. I tempted you to go. Oh no…
The future holds sightings such as these
Son, I am afraid you will not wander far
Into the wild, wondering, after this
You’ll grow tired; dreams will blow over
And son, you may forget the black, the white
You may forget. You will not have to.
But the winds will blow down from high
The stenches of what went before. It will grow
Dark, with only small curved slivers of bright
No comments:
Post a Comment