Whited sepulchres, literary lions,
shaking improbable manes in the
heat of the day,
go around in groups, yawning,
indifferent to the next kill,
lazy in their own Serengeti,
letting someone else in the pride
quarter new ground.
Stretched under the high noon of
approval,
pretending an unconcern with
flocking vultures -
omnivorous, unselective,
illiterate,
cloaking black the sun, shredding
rank flesh,
picking at exhausted bones -
they gaze out at dry plains,
complacent,
cultivating aloofness, looking
down each bored nose
at blurring images, unimaginable
prey; so very close now.
It needs only that agony of will,
that stretched effort,
to stalk, to judge, to taste the
wind and focus thought;
to register stampeding sound
drumming through the dark ground
of dusted dreams;
to smell the blood of running
words,
panicked, trapped, leaping up to
flower
and fall in patterned skins;
to see in startled eyes some
shaken truth arrested,
cut from the sky in shapes of
pain,
quivering in death.
But images will not stay,
insights flicker and drift,
shifting shadows;
bright life-blood is clawed out of
flying moments
by tense hunters -
not by wintered lions, white with
pride,
smiling into the jaws of lenses.
(April,
1990)
