Page 26 - WTP Vol. VIII #4

19
What Words
I have heard enough.
The terrifying papers, newscasts
calmly reported, have nothing to do with the animal prints on the porch,
drying blood on the bird feeder
where something came to an end.
I was deaf in my bed, thankful
not to wake again to a night of coyotes, their victory howling, their yipping
hysteria over snowbound kill. In the woods something is always watching,
my own fixed eye on the line
of three-toed tracks of the ruffled grouse
etched onto the bruise of snow.
I embarrass myself, this way of avoiding
what I might see, not able to bear
even the logical, as the illogical bears down:
the boy shot and dying in his brother’s arms. They said it, then they said it
again, no end to brothers, no end
to listening. The countries merge. In Beirut
with the Syrian refugees, my friend
writes that she sleeps in her coat, a knitted hat.
She is a lucky one, she says, safe
in an unheated apartment, no longer a pacifist
because she imagines the bombing of Assad’s palace, though she imagines all the other bombers
filled with food, dropping parcels over the city.
Her letters keep coming— I can barely follow.
I go out in the day-after calm of weather:
the wing of a grouse is perfectly etched in the snow, an angel shape where she dove.
I want to slap myself for my limits. What words for this seeing, what faith?
cleopatra MatHis