Your Old Animal

Last night you lifted a weightless bird and ate its six blue plumes.

Your last elite act, it gave you a temporary fear

of phosphorescence and gravity, and a dry cough. Soon

you’ll have to dine on your own grandmother

as she recommended herself on a recent menu,

an appetizer, and was largely responsible for your care and feeding

when you were helpless. To conserve energy, the best way to locate

food is to wait for your prey to get hungry

and go looking for a meal. Glow worms are great at this.

The blind salamander and the giant, too. The polar bear falling

though ice has lost half her body mass and will die. Sun and salt

turn against her, and she’s consumed. Nobody prays anymore.

Nobody fishes. What we send out is sacrificial without the wish,

an opportunity in catastrophe, the cue we take

from famished children climbing out of bunkers, shaking

off debris, their New World noses snouting

Old World undertones, earthy truffles followed by morels

followed by Mother’s Apple Stew. Some say End of times; others say

Delicious. Here’s a memory to let go: a bell clangs from the back door

and the door squeaks on its hinges and slams seven times

as all the piglets come running. Dinnertime, a passé tradition

where the air drains itself of color until pork and corn

steep the atmosphere. Also, this: thanking the Trinity who fortified

every meal: meat (Father), potatoes (Holy Ghost), a murdered vegetable

(Son) swimming in clarified butter. It’s all gone the way of Nuevo Fusion

and Unitarianism. Your stomach turns when the moon rises, carcasses

creep into dreams and you’re asked to look into the bleeding, bleating

mouth of a half-slaughtered goat (part sustenance, part sacrifice);

you sustain, I sacrifice. The next night it’s dog or sloth

or hammerhead shark. Now the meat they feed you might say anything —

any animal comes to beg the worst answers, knowing

you have amassed its mass, thoughtlessly, passively, as if

the good times could have lasted and you are shamed, crying,

brimming with the confessions tiny women speak

to tiny priests, innards and delicate bones you’ve been nibbling since birth.

They feed on your consequence. Consequently, you get desperately hungry again

and sometimes you are too scared to answer to the food

and your hunger makes you lonely and you pick up the dead phone.

It’s terrible how no one ever reveals anything about their inner lives

and when they do, you can’t digest what they say

and you want your loneliness back. That much hasn’t changed.

That, and you haven’t turned to your own flesh to stay alive, not yet,

not more than a little nibble. Need, like hunger, is outwardly inclined,

expanding with the universe. It’s pointless to weep for your old animal,

call it back in whatever specious form it might take now,

bolus of tooth, fur, claw, feather, bone,

as if you might rekindle some old appetite

for intimacy, as if it you wouldn’t just tear each other to pieces.

“Your Old Animal” first appeared in Gulf Coast, winter/spring 2011, Vol 23, issue 1.