There’s a bird believed to suck the teats of goats at night.
Flocks alight swollen on the slash pines while we sleep.
Here, in this dark field, among what’s been cast out
from the bodies of birds, goats, and men: Am I late or early?
I ask the black grass against my face. Without light,
every color is a past someone decided to believe in.
The official account is this: Judas’s organs burst from his body
in an open field, or he hanged himself from a tree.
It was after dark, it was day; and on the other side of the world,
a soldier’s ear in the street, severed from the mind,
could listen properly to dust. Cartilage coil in a street,
it spills, and this is silence. Or this is silence
betraying itself as currency.
If Judas coughs up a coin into my hand,
let it be night, the birds, hungry.
If I put what was once liquid metal in my mouth,
let my mouth become the metal burning:
a glossy orange arm reaching up, back to the crucible.
Judas is fully eared in the sunbright street, or
he is the nightly sigh of a goat going dry.
As milk slithers back from beak to udder,
he unbreaks his neck with a rope.
Which or both or neither, I am listening.