1.
Uncertain grey of early morning,
a quick warm cataract
is the birth of donkey,
now stuck with grass and its mother’s gum, legs bunched
under like unlit kindling
The field totters and rights itself
as the foal stands planted fast,
lapidarian beside a sun that shakes
in its haze, an earth
shirking underfoot
—beautiful he
stirs up still things
Trailing afterbirth regally
the mother-mountain instead comes to him:
strikes him over the head with
a teat to set
his flesh on its parting way
—be ahead of all partings,
as long gone already
like winter in spring;
and be ever-dying in your chosen-poison;
the cut-glass cup that shatters itself
and resounds down the great diminishing;
be—yet know
of its antipode,
nothing-source of your trembling ontology:
Oh I am here! And as such
I assent!
Great love overshoots its end
and shifts back its conception:
Was it then a thin
girl hand reached down to touch his curly brow
commanding in a tiny-headed tremolo
Father let us have him.
—Only know:
this is the animal that never was.
Of course he wasn’t.
But as we gave him space
the poor pure beast persisted
and in this place so white unfenced
he barely needed to exist yet raised his head