Читать книгу Late Empire - Lisa Olstein - Страница 9

QUESTIONS ARE AN ATTRIBUTE OF GOD

Light a steeple bright enough and blind

the bats will come stitching white

against the torn black cloth of sky.

All these years and still no one knows

what draws the moths and their buzzing

relations with tired jaws, or at least

no one’s told me. We know enough

to stop and look up, but not one thing

more. They look like manta rays

riding moony ocean waves, like lumens

let loose from a drunken ray gun.

I’m not necessarily convinced by ideas

that have been around so long it seems

their time must have come, but coyotes

do fill the night with tricks when they

throw their voices from bedside lamp

to rising sun, and reincarnation is one

explanation for some kinds of otherwise

inexplicable love. Forever my horse

has thought he is descended from unicorns,

he tells me over and over with the one

brown and one blue lake of his eyes

and doesn’t bat a lash when I tell him

unicorns only ever inhabited brutally

the northernmost seas. He just champs

his bit a little and stamps any nearby puddle

and refuses to blink, as if to say, yeah

well, what’s all that about you and whales

and the scaled digits of your precious thumbs?

On the 2× life-size statue of the saint

beneath the steeple beneath the moon,

the most realistic way to depict the eyes

is the inverse of true: pupils a bolt of stone

and all around them nothing but absence.