The Wait

Our climb uphill was slow that afternoon,
heat, moribunding our eyes.
The boulders atop the rising mountains
heaved as though they would anytime fall,
taking us further down. But we climbed on,
steering up the cocked pin
that brought us staring at the uprooted end
among the henged stones,
the clotting blackhead of an Indian God
in stippled stillness under the azure sky.

He was breathing. And yet magnificent.
But now with eyes yolked and hung out,
he would not move. Among the cobbles
his bust urine sac trickled down,
mapped in salted blessing
by the thirsting wayside jewel weeds.

All of his three feet of tousled silk
he tried to lift, but flayed with a deadweight
of his own stab horns, fell back ,
ulcering in simmering macadam .
The legs, splayed, vast without motion,
pumiced to veal.
But he would not cast away his celestial gaze.

A truck could not tow him, now, though.
But he had to be out of the way.
So, one, heavy muscled whom they found,
drunk until sweltering half past one,
tugged heavy knots around the broken legs,
pulled the heist over his shoulder
and they dragged him belching torn,
past the mist haze of the thickening pink grass,

downhill,
and out of sight.

Back in our muted climb up gear,
unused to the divine poltergeists of silent acceptance
of simple things around us that put to shame
the shrieking throttles of our human terror,
I saw that hot afternoon,
the heavy roll of stab horns hunting the sun’s red eclipse
burning the sea below, into a quiet abattoir.