As morning’s
enveloping light
nests in the trees
that gable
this country byway,
so they convene
in their buzzing
canonical hours
above, around,
and in the mound
of ocher fur
and putrefying meat
that unites with the
decomposing foliage.
The reek of slaughtered
stag calls them
to convocation
as if an olfactory
steeple bell.
They locate
nourishment
in the trachea,
mate in the mucosa,
deposit eggs
in the viscera.
This ransacked
carcass was once
a noble buck,
hilltop centurion,
antlers stately
as a laurel crescent,
not a study
for the camera’s
retina or
pointillist’s
brush dabs,
but a domicile
for maggots.
That is all.
That is all.
This poem first appeared in Plain Spoke.
—
Joel Allegretti is the author of, most recently, Platypus (NYQ Books, 2017), a collection of poems, prose, and performance texts, and Our Dolphin (Thrice Publishing, 2016), a novella. He is the editor of Rabbit Ears: TV Poems (NYQ Books, 2015). The Boston Globe called Rabbit Ears “cleverly edited” and “a smart exploration of the many, many meanings of TV.”
