WINTERKILL

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