Entire Known World So Far
What’s meant to be wind emerges from what’s
presumably a god’s mouth, as if people
thought that way, once, as I have read they did,
though I have never believed it. Yes,
the stag inexplicably there, on a raft
at sea, how the light catches in the runneled
fur of a dog’s underpaws as he steers
across dream; yes, the gods and their
signs, if you want, everywhere—
but the wind is the wind. The map makes
the world seem like a human body
when it’s been stripped and you can finally
see it for the world it is: plunderable—
almost, in places, as if asking for it—
who wouldn’t want to lay waste to it,
the map suggests, suggest the hands
that made the map, with the kind of
grace that proves grace can
be a sturdiness, too.
—
But the world is not like a human body.
Or the dark that, just past twilight, overtakes a canyon.
Or the shiver of sleigh bells on the collar
of an invisible donkey, scratching itself
in the dark,
in the cold of it—
donkey bells …
2020-07-20 00:11:01
3
0