To one, but he still will be For a little while still will be stopping
The flakes in the air with a look, Surrounding himself with the silence Of whitening snarls. Let him eat The last red meal of the condemned
To extinction, tearing the guts
From an elk. Yet that is not enough For me. I would have him eat
The heart, and, from it, have an idea Stream into his gnawing head That he no longer has a thing To lose, and so can walk
Out into the open, in the full
Pale of the sub-Arctic sun Where a single spruce tree is dying
Higher and higher. Let him climb it With all his meanness and strength. Lord, we have come to the end Of this kind of vision of heaven,
As the sky breaks open
Its fans around him and shimmers And into its northern gates he rises
Snarling complete in the joy of a weasel With an elk's horned heart in his stomach Looking straight into the eternal Blue, where he hauls his kind. I would have it all
My way: at the top of that tree I place
The New World's last eagle Hunched in mangy feathers giving
Up on the theory of flight. Dear God of the wildness of poetry, let them mate To the death in the rotten branches, Let the tree sway and burst into flame
And mingle them, crackling with feathers,
In crownfire. Let something come Of it something gigantic legendary
Rise beyond reason over hills Of ice SCREAMING that it cannot die, That it has come back, this time On wings, and will spare no earthly thing:
That it will hover, made purely of northern
Lights, at dusk and fall On men building roads: will perch
On the moose's horn like a falcon Riding into battle into holy war against Screaming railroad crews: will pull Whole traplines like fibers from the snow
In the long-jawed night of fur trappers.
But, small, filthy, unwinged, You will soon be crouching
Alone, with maybe some dim racial notion Of being the last, but none of how much Your unnoticed going will mean: How much the timid poem needs
The mindless explosion of your rage,
The glutton's internal fire the elk's Heart in the belly, sprouting wings,
The pact of the "blind swallowing Thing," with himself, to eat The world, and not to be driven off it Until it is gone, even if it takes
Forever. I take you as you are
And make of you what I will, Skunk-bear, carcajou, bloodthirsty