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Whenever I touch the cairn marking the summit of one of my parents, touch the top stone, an animal caution comes over me, sinew and muscle like the brook’s, a sudden shivering green-brown flame. Soon they will be constellations, and I a small tower of stones.

Consider the toucan’s festive gold breast. Its multicolored pecker, oddly cutesy & perhaps, a cartoon-comfort to the gym-roped Westerners reclining on a beach in Costa Rica. It’s the same old song: good-natured smile, hard work, a hat’s off kind of attitude & before you can say post-racial, you’re a Resort Toucan. The benefits are room & board but the cost is blood. Most times it’s the closest ones—birds of the same rainforest, same quadrant, same tree—who give up your whereabouts to the jaguar. Quick as you got the gig, the boss is tossing you out on your ass all over some flipped umbrellas & a tourist’s scarfed thumb. So now you’re roofless, alone, vulnerable & the beast is licking his chops in your mirrored aviators. Stifling too is the Midwestern Subdivision in its treatment of the black squirrel. Science tells us black squirrels have driven out native grey squirrels in numerous areas, but no bullshit in my development, black squirrels are relegated to lots with a view of the highway. Mornings they work shade for acorns between homes narrow as Lincoln Logs. History tells us black squirrels can’t afford robust landscaping but will pay their mortgage— chair the neighborhood watch if you like. Slenderizing, their night of hair. They’re sun’s prey. They avoid overexposure, make tanning trend. Black squirrels they fit in, get along. Know no one. They see other black squirrels & run.

The mower flipped it belly up, a baby garter less than a foot long, dull green with a single sharp stripe of pale manila down its back, same color as the underside which was cut in two places, a loop of intestine poking out. It wouldn't live, so I ran the blades over it again, and cut it again but didn’t kill it, and again and then again, a cloud of two-cycle fuel smoke on me like a swarm of bees. It took so long my mind had time to spiral back to the graveyard I tended as a child for the dead ones, wild and tame: fish from the bubbling green aquarium, squirrels from the road, the bluejay stalked to a raucous death by Cicero the patient, the tireless hunter, who himself was laid to rest one August afternoon under a rock painted gray, his color, with a white splash for his white splash. Once in the woods I found the skeleton of a deer laid out like a diagram, long spine curved like a necklace of crude, ochre spools with the string rotted away, and the dull metal shaft of the arrow lying where it must have pierced not the heart, not the head, but the underbelly, the soft part where the sex once was. I carried home the skull with its nubs of not-yet-horns which the mice had overlooked, and set it on a rock in my kingdom of the dead. Before I chopped the little snake to bits of raw mosaic, it drew itself into an upward-straining coil, head weaving, mouth open, hissing at the noise that hurt it. The stripe was made of tiny paper diamonds, sharp-edged but insubstantial, like an x-ray of the spine or the ghost beginning to pull away. What taught the snake to make itself seem bigger than it was, to spend those last few seconds dancing in the roar and shadow of its death? Now I see, though none exists, its grave: harebells withered in a jar, a yellow spiral painted on a green-black stone, a ring of upright pine cones for a fence. That’s how the deer skull lay in state until one of the neighborhood dogs came to claim it, and carried it off to bury in the larger graveyard of the world.

Someone once told me that animals are people under spells, and if you fall in love with them the spell will be lifted. I recently fell in love with a black trumpeter swan. I watched her ruffle her neck feathers for hours, watched her peck bugs from her breast. I was sure she would make a beautiful bride, but she was always a black trumpeter swan. I once brushed a horse’s hair for 3 straight years until it crumpled into death. The truth is there is no such thing as spells. The world is always as it is, and always as it seems. And love is just our own kind voice that we whisper into our own blood.

If I had a hundred dollars to spend, Or maybe a little more, I’d hurry as fast as my legs would go Straight to the animal store. I wouldn’t say, “How much for this or that?” “What kind of a dog is he?” I’d buy as many as rolled an eye, Or wagged a tail at me! I’d take the hound with the drooping ears That sits by himself alone; Cockers and Cairns and wobbly pups For to be my very own. I might buy a parrot all red and green, And the monkey I saw before, If I had a hundred dollars to spend, Or maybe a little more.

I do better in animal time, a creeping dawn, slow ticking toward dusk. In the middle of the day on the Nebraska prairie, I’m unnerved by subdued sounds, as if listening through water, even the high-pitched drone of the cicadas faint; the blackbirds half-heartedly singing. As newlyweds, my parents drove cross country to Death Valley, last leg of their escape from New York, the thick soups of their immigrant mothers, generations of superstitions that squeezed them from all sides. They camped under stars that meant no harm. It was the silence that alerted them to danger. They climbed back into their tiny new car, locked its doors and blinked their eyes until daylight.

The red sun rises without intent and shines the same on all of us. We play like children under the sun. One day, our ashes will scatter— it doesn’t matter when. Now the sun finds our innermost hearts, fills us with oblivion intense as the forest, winter and sea.

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.

One by one, like guests at a late party They shake our hands and step into the dark: Arabian ostrich; Long-eared kit fox; Mysterious starling. One by one, like sheep counted to close our eyes, They leap the fence and disappear into the woods: Atlas bear; Passenger pigeon; North Island laughing owl; Great auk; Dodo; Eastern wapiti; Badlands bighorn sheep.

Looking at the lion behind the plate glass I wasn’t sure what I was looking at: a lion, OK, but he seemed to come apart, not literally I mean, but I couldn’t see him whole: Mane. Teeth. The slung belly pumping as he panted and began to roar. His balls sheathed in fur swaying a little. His tail’s tuft jerking in an arc like an old-time pump handle rusted in midair. Somebody or something I read once said that when Jesus had his vision of what his father, God, would do to him, that Jesus could only see pieces of a cross, pieces of a body appearing through flashes of sun, as if the body in his vision was hands looking for feet, a head for a torso, everything come unmagnetized from the soul: the lion caught me in his stare not at or through me but fixated on the great chain of being that Jesus couldn’t see and that a zebra might gallop in — black and white stripes marking longitudes of this world turning to meat, bloody meat — this vision of an inmate that Jesus’s father helped to orchestrate by making a cageless cage with glass instead of bars — though the lion didn’t seem to care, he was roaring for his keepers to bring him food, so everything’s what it should be if you’re a lion. Nor did the sea lion seem concerned about having gone a little crazy, barking incessantly so I could see the plush, hot pink insides of its throat, though like the lion through the glass there’s this distortion, my reflection I’m looking through that makes me float above the zoo: and now this silence at closing time pours like a waterfall in different zones of silences that, pouring through my head, surround roaring, barking, human muttering — is any of that what being sounds like? Or is it just animal gasping like what Jesus must have heard from the thieves hanging beside him, one damned, one saved? What was in his heart when his vision clarified and he saw it was a hand he recognized that the nail was driving through?