On Hind Legs
- Author(s):
- Carlos Valentin III
- Issue:
- On Loss (May 2023)
- Department:
- Inward Light
To walk the construction of spoken thought,
the assumption of sentience
for presuming infinity
despite our measure of time
by Earth’s rotation round itself and the sun
instead of a galaxy’s turn
or the expansion of the universe.
Instead of the passage of unfulfilled desire
and half-remembered dream—
a hill mynah’s death-notes
tuned toward older cloudscapes
back to the first song it learned,
the ancestral memory of an asteroid
and the lost hope that it not fall to Earth,
every wingbeat a flight
from the echo of its impact,
from the rat-faced creatures
that later nested in its crater—
the hypostasis of conflicting forms,
no more a parent’s ridicule
than a child’s scorn.
– 09/14/2022
Carlos Valentin III is a member of Pima Meeting in Tucson, Arizona (IMYM).