In Favor of Lightning

Beginnings

Beginnings A cloud might have moved into their bodies for them to sleep like that, snouts grinding into mud, each pig a raw silhouette finding such exotic contortions that you think of kneeling to rearrange their discomfort. You think to them you must seem a distant industry. Their eyes barely hold your shape and you're vague as the rib shed by Adam. You are the upright shadow whose feet flatten the earth like fruit dropping. Slowly the farm takes in the story of creation, each acre exposed, grey as a dream of self-sufficiency. Here are the spiritual slop, the buckets, the moon and the animals' unconscious bleatings. Here, the carnal state before it weakened, and here you are touching your face, knowing it as a strange appendage, leaning it over the pen like a flower that grows between the difficult border of starlight and slaughter. 30 ...