Читать книгу Alphabet Year - Devon Miller-Duggan - Страница 10

Returning from church or the cliff-edge, she spread her arms.

Meanwhile, the others lay themselves down along the shore.

Perhaps selchies. Perhaps for every animal, there is a tribe who can remove their skins.

By their skinlessness, by their dreams, by furtiveness—

how they might be known.

Nay bloodworm, nor buzzard can know which of their sisters,

whether any of them chooses, whether each alive thing is

xylem in its soul—tough, fibrous, hard to cut

down, to be nourished by.

Love, some find themselves reaching out of their own skins,

each toward sentience, speech, walking, or longing to

gather themselves only ever with themselves

again, again, against & among

or away into a second nature.

For all flesh shall in their second selves see new gods,

certain of them will walk and walk

to find hiding places for their first skins, a universal

kenosis, all walking away from the divinity of first being,

unraveled until only humans. Leaving, then, only the trees:

justice and judge

zenith and zendo.

Yet the bloodworm, the single unstinging jellyfish, the krill

vent themselves back into their unskins,

quiet again.

I cannot find my own first skin.

Some other godling fills it, fails it.

Kenosis (noun), Christ’s relinquishment of divinity in becoming human.

Xylem (noun), water-conducting tissue of woody plants.