Aint this the mountain where they tell me
go tell it? Something familiar as a backhand
about this scene. Chaindangler, fire
been the deadliness of night-shade. Fire
has been the price for fire. I too have brothers
locked up in the earth’s hardest jaw, had friends in
high places—strung there—who never lived to see
the sinewy trespass of beaks for themselves,
whose deaths were erected to be trespassed upon,
whose flesh don’t forgive its debtors, the flesh itself
old currency. Whose mercy
is whose meat? Your legacy lines the quadrants
coat-of-arming the haints of my nightmares.
It doesn’t distinguish cross from gun, scarecrow
from Jim. How could you not foreknow
these stakes? how their stench a still wind carried
from houndsnout to holler sunk somewhere behind
the evening’s grisly sigh? Here is wisdom: aint much
that burns that can’t be a feast for beasts. Still
the blackest-plumed hunter hasn’t
the palate for its own organs. I had friends
ascended in billows, and now
what I got is vengeful gods.