appears on the screen.
I touch it.
The mountain goat
is back in her matted wool coat,
and the early spring snow
is snow again, everywhere.
I watch her spinning, bucking
movements, the more-and-more
cast rags of fleece
until the white at her feet
is water and all winter
growth is off. The arrow
again. It hunts itself
back to the beginning
and I am—what?—
its servant? Its god?
I touch it again
under the shelter.
Again on the bus.
Only the mediation
is human: this frame:
a mountain goat and her new kid,
too new to even know winter,
mimicking her motions—
her pale shadow.
I try to look at them as them
but I feel allegory
straining to be born
in the holes
behind my eyes, something
about emptiness. Inheritance.
A self-shaped burden.
The end of a cold season.
***
An earlier version of this poem appears in the print anthology Cascadia Field Guide (Mountaineers Books, 2023)
