Abbr. Bestiary
Ripped page docks tail, crops ear into a new morality, wild and bewildering as the first, lacuna’s lecture in extremities’ extremis, object’s altered lesson, as if less were best in show, leaves brittled and unbound, ex-codex wrecked irreversibly, thus resurrected into parchment’s favorite parable. Adam rendered hemless hovers above former feet, element-defeated, amputated into the blank space past where the image ends, in which the now-invisible animals lay waiting for the curse or blessing of a name. New math says this torn pard—real leopard’s imaginary half— is now a quarter creature and freer for it, says lines of horse permute to lines of shore, a jagged absence. To those who’d want to hide in hide or hold tail’s tale, I say let go and look below. A see-through sea’s bright side laps at a world of virtues and of vices unmoored bodiless, no herd or flock to cower or to crow, murder excised and pride elided. That roar you hear is just eternity.