The Summer Home of Ten Nocturnal Animals
Here is the jaguar who says I have four legs. The blood of a little gazelle is delicious but the blood of a bull is better. When we lived in Texas everything seemed so promising and then even the dog went wild and looked unhappy. Everywhere I go the shadow comes. That is also us. I am soft in a cup, there is nothing on earth that cannot hurt me. Salt, even, Water. I wished I were someone different but then luckily, finally, I didn’t. When I was a branch of a tree (which was never) I had to remember this is my body, too. Once the lightening came and the sap in the branch went up in smoke and the wood there was dead, a dead thing, a home for beetles and then everything was warm again, that was the sun. My arms and legs were all one cylinder, my family still a branch, still a live oak hanging over a river that moves slowly on the surface and then the next thing you know they want take-out chicken and not your own. This is only the water running in and out of self, a slow fountain. If I tell you there are children jumping rope, you are waiting for a bad story. There is none. There they were, I tell you, and your brain is waiting, the little animal in the bones, the amygdala or panic almond, I have two, they are not interchangeable and they must be the most perfectly burnished parts of my brain because everything is a ten alarm fire in the wild, so far, however, they have lived. That is what I wanted to remind you. Sometimes that is the story. No one stole our dinner. The tree lived almost forever. The children grew and remembered their struggles and there was enough food, even bread, for everyone. It was summer for five minutes then bang a red hammer came down and made Christmas.
This poem is part of a new collection/anthology coming out in 2025.
