Lives of the Animals by Robert Wrigley

Author:Robert Wrigley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

HORSEFLIES

After the horse went down

the heat came up,

and later that week

the smell of its fester yawed,

an open mouth of had-been air

our local world was licked

inside of, and I,

the boy who’d volunteered at twilight—

shunts of chawed cardboard

wadded up my nostrils

and a dampened bandanna

over my nose and mouth—

I strode then

into the ever-purpler sink

of rankness and smut,

a sloshful five-gallon bucket of kerosene

in my right hand,

a smoking railroad fusee

in my left,

and it came over me like water then,

into my head-gaps and gum

rinds, into the tear ducts

and taste buds and even

into the last dark tendrils

of my howling, agonized hair

that through the windless half-light

hoped to fly from my very head,

• • •

and would have, I have no doubt, had not

the first splash of kerosene

launched a seething skin

of flies into the air

and onto me, the cloud of them

so dense and dark my mother in the distance

saw smoke and believed as she had feared

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