In the interval, an element and its hostile equivalent. The hawk flies up with a difficult freight, then rabbit substance drops in failure. Old anarchy,
a puny spectacular, the ooze and filtrate red gush mechanics of vanishing. Dead rabbit eyes emptying out, released into the wild,
and it felt like a kiss. So this is all, I thought. The god apparatus distracted in reverie, the god project agitated elsewhere, a spark:
forgetful and unripe, compounded, tangled, a larva god shivering in fuels, waxing in a god lathe, turning in truant resins.
Does he resent my missing his presence? The window frame hive body, the mind’s sharpened tools. I had catalogued your restless flowers,
spun your birds into dimension, navigated each tooth and feather, each difficult beadwork eye above your half-tone death yard, your acute, excitable
acceleratant dusk. It took layers of need to sew you up, god thimble, sullen, intractable threads, brood materials, your death love! The unwieldy scours my blood, your incognito split open
as the hawk pivots its fibrous wits above the limited world’s meats and pelts, all perceiving motor, optic nerve, dead hunger.
RACCOON by Amy Newman
Have you seen him attack? He wonders. Stumbling like a suffering guest, panicked in flowers. The gray dusk outlines
make nature almost sweet. The muscari like little Edens, young leaves in that innocent spring green against bright flagstone—maybe it will storm;
the raccoon doesn’t care about your weather, your tulips, waxy and serene, the wretched love of pretty. Distress shivers the trees. Even the squirrel evades, propelled,
conveyed, in haste. The raccoon is embarrassed by your ignorance. He will tear it all to shreds. Have you seen the savage teeth? He wants to know.
The raccoon is penitent like everyone else. But he never averts an eye. He is ashamed to eat and kill, he is ashamed
of his gait, the nocturnal shriek, the malice, the contradictions in nature, all fur and affliction, the difference
between his costume and his hunger, the ashen obligations of his survival. Oh the raccoon is ashamed, he regrets his lot, but it doesn’t stop him.
