She begins with a guttural moan
deep in her throat, our Russian Blue,
and leans her chin close to the pile
convulsing rhythmically
like a clock hand around a spindle,
stepping and retching
always in the center of the Turkish rug,
until she spits out a blue-gray finger of fur
and walks away untroubled.

I envy her that Catholic act / how she doesn’t
notice from the damp stain
(a dun rosette, a dark red filigree)
the whole mandala of rug
snaking out in every direction,
circles within circles within borders,
each with their own gods and gardens.

How we are moving mandalas, too —
how even in some still places:
the bullring in Ronda
(the footsteps and the blood smoothed over now),
on the parquet floor of the Palladium
polished over, the boys and girls gone
to cries of pleasure and pain, to other births
and other deaths.

We clean because we are clean animals, yes,
but also because the marks of love and loss,
the damp stains of death and desire
the pentimenti of living, if they were left,
would be too bleak
and beautiful to bear.

Copyright © 2018 Lilibug Publishing.

It’s elk season — bow hunting,
and the burros from the ranch
across the road are grazing
next to my tent when I wake up.

No one tends them:
they come to my hand,
water boils for coffee;
they nuzzle a packet of rice and beans.

The fourteenth anniversary of my father’s death
falls in this time
of turning leaves in the high country,
of archers in camouflage.

I remember it this morning
because he also was hunted, in his way,
drinking more as the season cooled.

At the ranch, the outfitters
use the burros to bring down elk,
field-dressed, quartered,
from high up on the trail
above the aspen.

Soon the faces of these animals
will harden with work,
one step following the other

but for now they are waiting,
warm and open, watching
as I shake out the coffee cup,
tighten the straps of my pack
and start out again,
taking the dead on my back
with a kind of reverence.

Copyright © 2018 Lilibug Publishing.