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PICTOGRAPH: STAR BEING CAVE

Womb of earth and we, its organs. It is bone-dry, now dead. To run our hands over its sides would be to scrape them. Lice-filled nests, broken shells with inner seams of blood, guano pooling like oil on the ledges. Flicker and pigeon feather, dirt and scat in tiny chains of pellets, rat or squirrel, some fur-bearing creature hunting eggs. But if there were a fire, if we crouched by it in the night, walls drawn with stars and humans who resemble stars or birds, the cave would come alive, by which I mean the lower kind rush out, the eagle walk with its wings lifted so they don’t drag. Its eye, a predator’s eye. Graffiti and beer cans, the deep ruts cut from a truck in spring, the curators who chiseled out the central pictograph and then left—couldn’t they see it? How it ties us to the past? The cave has elbows. The cave breathes and counts its breaths, its cavities filling up with light and dust and allergens.