Wild Kingdom

for Milan Kundera This is your foreign correspondent, Aristotle, for The Poetics, reporting live from the Mediterranean where the skulls and bones of a few Egyptians crown the tradeships of His Majesty, wave back and forth: starfish—moons—Februaries. To my right, our military advisor, Hernando Cortez, oversees operations at the Aztec/ Mexican border where to the left of a stone no longer rising from water a dove collects its nest egg upon the skeleton of a hummingbird. To my left, our scribe-in-residence, St. Nickle-and-Dime-‘Em-To-Debt, scribbles furiously to a mortgaged future where the last rites of man and of-man are delivered at the near-twin births of the lyric and gunpowder.