Scared Text

SWALLOW ORBIT

 CREATURE’S CREATURE The scopes Minus used to scan his silhouette developed latent veins in his eyes. He perceived a tail’s erosion. I am awake, he said, but I think I need to describe myself. He tried to tell himself what a tongue was. It made a ball of ice, some smoke. The mouth of the next thing he said came out clear. I hid my hidden head. It starred. He claimed it calmed his ghost whenever he spoke to the well of its engine. He shook the snow from his clothes. No one whispered the destroyed elements that would have framed his silence. Nothing, he replied. Nothing. I just told you my greatest secret. When he is sleeping in the riverbed, he lights up alluvial figures.Though not alone, he knows no more of the beings beyond him than to fear the sun. He recalled being posed. He thought, I am being posed. And though he was perfectly fused from the sunlight, it was not exactly singing, what was seeding inside. As he turned his passages into their seasons, he let them be. He fished his shelves, then poured out the chimney. A bundle of swollen strangers, he scared them, and all their trebles and springs retreated. He taught his beak to break the aviary open. He called himself Creature and Creature’s Creature. It named the surface beneath his scales. ...