She intends to come back;
leaves for, whatever reason.
This can look like better meat,
some potential for growth, territories glimmering—
Anyway she circles and circles until some line is crossed.
It was autumn.
And all the colors were doing their migration towards red
or edges were curling and water
slowing down its movement of things.
But the line was meandering as usual through its terrain of low-lying living things—
they hug the earth.
We could even say, it was invisible.
‘It was invisible.’
But crossing made it shine.
Pop Pop.
823F.
oh-six.
Pop.
Pop.
The gratifying miss did not appear there
and the afternoon cracked open into something else:
Now we have vacancies in the thing itself.
She is heaving red along some very deadly
border.
The radios are firing signals of taps out into space and domicile.
Pop rings and returns off canyon walls, slides its elegy off the waxes of all the leaves and yammers into the future where 832F is swallowed by her opposite.
To beget a new thing she is moved from hand to hand, gathering and losing weird kinds of value. Among her own kind there is a lot of talk of successive planning.
There are even some ideas. There are bodies lining up or coming into contact with each other.
Vying.
And there are other bodies wishing for to be visited by this same smallish change,
whelped into alternative.
To say nothing of grey, mottled with white and yellow, dense and very very warm. That this means something or is worth what it is worth paying to hold this.
Whitish grey-warm body.
Whitish-grey-warm,
which, dignified,
stands in for itself
here on the thread of land
which runs between
this or that version of safety.
Her gods call this weather —
There is less green.
There is red.
There is red growing around her and slowing inside, congealing to black, and there is the memory of what has been left with so much intention slipping into air with the almost instant change of dust hanging in constellated moments of logic.
Around the wound, what was contained by the rubric of flesh is made to spread until it just runs out of options.
And grows still,
going it alone,
the river becoming thin,
then stream,
then brook,
then the mist of articulated singular molecules
dividing
and dividing
and dividing
until they do not recognize each other,
the breath just a whistle
covering the scream
of cells choked out
in this almost national park.
And while there is bleeding out, there is also looking.
There is the transportation of bodies.
There is moving over water and over snow.
There are other options and really only one.
There are demands for reparations, entitlements.
There are arguments about preservation—
music is played.
There are movements and movement until that movement is out of time and she is on her belly in the company of another her who is always saying to herself,
We would not say to stuff. This is a common misconception. There is stuff and stuffing, the idea of shape but it is wrapped in the material pushed into a particular being by what a leg up will first allow, that one would be in the middle of the hunt, or sitting docilely, or forced into some reloaded attack stance someone saw somewhere in an image, an archive, there are all these books —
Mutter mutter.
And then some white space for quiet.
She is on her belly here.
It is like a museum in that it performs its circular function by way of straight lines.
Recall the grand dolphin
held fast in resin and birds
midflight to other, Frencher
grand galleries, so waiting
to join the Big Procession.
Recall the photograph of the man in the suit, walking the opposite direction. And will return weekends. And comes first thursdays.
Outside, skittery traveling kids affix tails to their belt loops. We can see them in dreams or just out the window like they dream of trains which are running on past lives, circling that lost pet of distance.
Each tail stands for the real body it was severed from.
Like a totem.
And each corner of each street is then
whatever not-magic lets one stand for another.
And the idea of foxes in suits.
Pictures of turkeys at gunpoint named art and then, more specifically, Turkey At Gunpoint.
This is all coming in through the worn compact disc of mutterer’s radio alarm clock.
You might first say,
that we are at the beginning
by saying that we are in the middle of the action.
We are always in the middle of the action.
Only beginnings account for this properly.