WINTERKILL

Robert Wrigley

So many stiffs, cadaver by cadaver
the long walk up-canyon dazzles me
with carnage. Winterkill's minions,
muzzle and haunch, mile on mile
of stench and bloat. Not even coyotes
can keep up appearances: they're gone to seed,
slavering, lazy, panting the nightly howls
like moans, with a day thrum
counterpoint of black fly drones.
Here a bull and here a cow, here a buck
and there a doe. With X's of sprayed orange paint
I mark them all, and with numbers.
Here's a pine bough garland hung on an up-thrust hoof.

It is June, I am twenty-four and could not be
happier, though my finger is scarred orange
and every night my crotch is a moonscape of ticks.
Their hiss and pop in the fire's a balm, some tongue
of smoke from them licks the trout's pink meat,
salt of my own burnt blood in a bite.
O genocide most sensible, I am the taker
of winter's census. I write it all down
for the keepers of graphs, I walk and record
and dream the future in the spill of guts.
Death is God, I say one day,
when the sun off the creek has made me blind.

And it is how it is, as we have always heard.
Diminished by one sense, we feel another
come on: the flocculent smell of it then.
It was on me, I was in it-rank fester
plush in the lachrymal moss, eye mush
and larval tongue, a song of offal and smut.
Then I woke changed, and made my marks,
and kept on moving, a tally the end of which