Holy Heathen Rhapsody Read Online Free Page B

scavenger, pocked hide, warty
    muzzle, one hip lower than the other,
    she came to him by mistake (sent
    by the Mistake Maker) straight
    from the African plains
    in a crate marked
The Unsightly.
    Cur-crone, she knows everything
    about following lions, those regal
    rumps, at a distance. She knows
    about cowering, circling and circling,
    the dart-in, the rip, and the snatch.
    Snarling, ears back, half charging,
    she’s put to rout, in her time,
    many worrisome vultures
    and carrion crows.
    By the neat nip of her teeth,
    she’s pulled fetid strings
    of maggot-infested flesh
    from abandoned hides;
    once existed for a month
    on the putrid marrow
    from a wild boar’s corpse.
    She’s lived in even leaner
    times, leaping and munching
    on lizards, grasshoppers,
    and grubs.
    Her eyes have seen the evening
    sun setting on the Serengeti
    from inside the boney cavern
    of a fallen wildebeest.
    She’s called with others
    beside a kill, yelped, howled
    for murder’s sake in chorus
    all night long on the starless
    grass sky of the savannah.
    Forager, tenacious scrounger,
    scarred, crippled
    by the hooves of kicking
    gazelles, she knows
    better than anyone else
    what kind of god it was
    who left the pure white bone
    of the moon picked so clean.
    With scab worms and billy-club knots
    on her rear, she’s here—Thief, Felon,
    Mongrel Messiah—beside the blind
    beggar for good.
    And now when his sustaining
    visions of bonfires over water
    come only dimly and rarely
    when his fingertips harden, tough
    and numb as leather and his beseeching
    talents fail, when all sighted
    angels face in the opposite
    direction and there is no one
    in that dark and frightening
    paucity who sees
    that he does not see,
    then with his hand on her head,
    she can lead him down these alleys
    in the way he has to go.



LESS THAN A WHISPER POEM
    no sound above a nod,
    nothing louder than one wilted
    thread of sunflower gold dropping
    to a lower leaf
    nothing more jarring
    than the transparent slide of a raindrop
    slicking down the furrow of a mossy
    trunk
    slightly less audible than the dip
    and rock of a kite string lost and snagged
    on a limb of oak
    no message
    more profound than December edging
    stiffly through the ice-blue branches
    of the solstice
    nothing more riotous
    than a cold lump of toad watching
    like a stone for a wing of diaphanous
    light to pass,
    as still as a possum’s feint
    no message more profane than
    three straws of frost-covered grass leaning
    together on an empty dune
    a quiet more
    silent than a locked sacristy at midnight,
    more vacant than the void of a secret
    rune lost at sea
    no sound, not even
    a sigh the width of one scale of a white
    moth’s wing, not even a hush the length
    of a candle’s blink
    nothing,
    even less than an imagined finger held
    to imagined lips

IN THE SILENCE FOLLOWING
    After a freight train lumbers by,
    hissing steam and grumbling curses,
    metal screeching against metal, it passes
    into the night (which is the empty
    shadow of the earth), becoming soft
    clinking spurs, a breathy whistle, low
    bells clanking like tangled chains,
    disappearing as if on lambskin wheels.
    Something lingers then in the silence,
    a reality I can’t name. It remains as near
    to a ghost as the thought of a ghost
    can be, hovering like a dry leaf spirit
    motionless in a hardwood forest absent
    of wind, inexplicably heraldic. It is closest
    to the cry of a word I should know
    by never having heard it.
    What hesitates in that silence possesses
    the same shape as the moment coming
    just after the lamp is extinguished
    but before the patterned moonlight
    on the rug and the window-squares
    of moonlight on the wall opposite
    become evident. That shift of light
    and apprehension is a form I should know
    by having so readily recognized it.
    After the yelping dog is chastened
    and a door slams shut on the winter evening
    filled with snow and its illuminations,
    someone standing outside in the