In Favor of Lightning

On the Porch in the Evening

On the Porch in the Evening You can't pet them. These are the ones the fields kept—burrs, infestations, sores near their eyes. They'll work their teeth over birds they've crippled, snatch what moves in the air. The tiniest death inspires them. Why do you listen? Tonight they only hurt one another, carrying the hatred of their own species clear as the marble of each eye. But, they're not committed: they go at it like schoolchildren. You listen. Braced beneath the exposed wire, you try to separate the slope of dark from the lawn's edge, their weight from stumps or far muscular outlines. Only a true extrovert could conceive of this, of them, the way a boy might load one up with a firecracker then stand back as it grows inflated, arched to where it will burst and scatter its teased fur. They look like that now, spraying first, knowing only that they will mate or fight, sometimes in the crawl space, sometimes the ghosted garden 43 and never pretty. The one is crouched rigid as a saint and the other is clumsy for all its machinery. Often one will dig in the middle of it, a sane act, a private act, a need you can almost understand as you'd hear speech in their plaintive sulking, or think in your dreams how a reptile is folding. When it's over they slant away—distracted tails your only marker for having seen them. Why do you do it? You go down with a pan of warm milk, place it on that spot of grass where the ground is cold and think how it must have hurt, how at least they'd be hungry. If you stand under the moon like the curator of something—what is it? 44 ...