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.