Fire Ants
A rattlesnake is a hallucination — chartreuse on black —
departs its shed skin under the exhausted
Jonathan apple while you twist
in sleep. Up-mountain
seven acres blaze into seven hundred,
then seven thousand. Your slender fingers
curl into palms, wrists bend toward sky —
you make your pillows wet.
Your thighs are burning. How many legs
on how many spiders
are crisped to an absent stench?
Forget about escape. Forget about
not being able to see what you descry.
At an outdoor market
a pile of deep fried ants fills a turquoise bowl.
Toothpicks stacked for sampling.
The art of death
is not an art of adaptation,
it is an art of reinvention.
A smoke forest becomes the cloud forest
where you once watched the tops of mountains
turn into goddesses clothed in satin,
watched them leap until they were naked,
their golden bangles slipping one by one
out of the ether,
ringing the rocky peaks.
* * * * *
An Exultation of Spirit
I wish I could say that a surgeon’s knife
in the small of my back and the successful removal
of some extra bone, the liberation of a cornered nerve,
would be enough to jump start me back into the joy of living,
and that this morning — as I watched a massive raven,
much larger than I would have thought,
land on the rim of the birdbath and drop a mouse carcass in,
hop away, pick it back up with its beak, drop it in again,
shake it around in the water, gulp a few sips, then fly off
with the baptized meal — I wish I could say that it was enough,
to have observed this clever raven — to see that its practice
was wise, and after, when I went out to make fresh again
the water for the other birds and found the entrails, the stomach,
a bloated liver, floating in the shallow water, I wish I could say
that I felt grateful for my life — to be present in the raw early morning,
in this orchard of aspens and wild plums — the damp pines
bending their boughs toward my house, but what I received
was not an exultation of spirit, but rather a yank in the flesh,
much like a set of fresh stitches being ripped out — blessed is not
what you receive in this life, blessed is how you renounce it.