The solitary animal walks alone. She has no uterus. She has no bone.
She slithers around dark bars and libraries. She carves
a beautiful girl on the cave wall. She dances with Aurora Borealis,

Nobody understood her cruelty to herself. In this life, cruelty
begets cruelty, and, before long, one would have to chop off
one's own hand to end the source of self-torture. Yet, we

Your country’s memory is short. But know this:
We live, have been living, with this threat
staining the earth we still call home

We shall see the deer as part of the trunks of the forest.

We shall see its antlers imitating the branches of the trees.

Displayed in the coin shop window 
below the Spanish doubloons and Flemish guilders, 
in a row of talismans on felt cushions, 

In the Kyi Valley of Tibet, a snow-white desert
where an orchestra of lamas performs by starlight for the gods,
it is said that when we near death, and may least suspect it,

A wall of fire steals across the prairie 
and the string quartet in the downstairs parlor 
breaks off suddenly when a blizzard of light invades our sleep, 

Here is a piece of required reading 
at the end of our century
the end of a millenium that began with the crusades

The Hyperboreans—“people beyond the North Wind” —
according to Diodorus Siculus, inhabited an island
from which the moon “appears to be but a little

At the bus stop a blind man sells colored pencils.
Ballpoint pens, too, at Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Ten cents for a pencil, two bits for a pen.