But as the sun rises—the clean stretch, aesthetic vertebrae—how I might flex its
elegant, careful weight.
Consider my newfound balance, how gracefully I ascend a flight of stairs,
teetering on one leg, my rump poised just so!
Or how I might signal to my lover, wave fondly to her through the air,
lift my fur to tickle her mouth, dash a small crumb off her lips.
In a midnight alley, flashing my snowy underside like a switchblade, we’d sprint
through underbrush.
Had I a tail, I would be luminous and lingering as a comet, who traces the starry night
with a broken ellipsis . . .
*
As a kid, I remember the small green bubble inside the carpenter’s level,
How it would dart from corner to corner,
And how good it felt to straddle the sawhorse, out behind the shed, half tomboy,
half centaur,
How I clenched a two-by-four between my thighbones and it was part of me.
A nest of yellow jackets rose from beneath the splinters and, forgetting how to move,
how to cry, how to run,
I let them sting and sting and sting, eleven times, leaving swells on my arms, neck, legs,
feet, and shoulders.
*
O Lord of Parts, O Holy Tool Shed!
When I rise from these sore bones,
Look what you’ve taken, what you’ve left me—
In Full Velvet
When Aristotle dissected the embryos in bird eggs,
he mistook the spinal cord for the heart.
Anaximander of Miletus wrote that the first humans
burst out of the mouths of fish
and that we took form there
and were held prisoners until puberty.
At its root, taxidermy means to arrange skin.
O Love, how precise is any vision?
*
Gut a body and we’re nothing left but pipes whistling in the breeze.
That’s all the cassowary is when you slit her open:
She’s lungs wrapped in dark fur. She’s a full baritone with a soft wattle.
There’s nothing in her casque but soft tissue.
Because it makes me want to turn away,
I watch film footage of scientists
poking through the pink tendons,
the reptilian claw of the euthanized Casuarius.
When they fondle the sweet spot, a talon shoots out and stabs a melon
the same as it would the appendix of a lazy zookeeper.
I had to cover my eyes when they severed the ancestral wing.
*
Before the antlers fall away, here’s what
the taxidermist teaches:
Because the velvet grows onto the hide we have to skin it and cut it,
so nothing rips up and causes damage.
Being cautious that we don’t give it a big yank,
use your knife and just kind of pull gently.
Go on—tap the skin away from the bur.
See we boned it out.
For hard boned deer we usually just kind of
but we can’t do that when it’s in full velvet or it will, you know.
Now we’re going to put a puncture in the tip.
So, we’re not just hitting the one vein.
That’s what we want to see.
*
It’s also true that some whitetails never lose their velvet.
Hunters raise their eyebrows calling them atypical,
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
