Kit Kelen #915b - long gloss in the riddling quality of others (after Les Murray's 'The Gods')

        915

        b

          long gloss in the riddling quality of others

after Les Murray's 'The Gods'

who are they, the ones we worship,

take for types, exemplary or otherwise?

I am a fox

you think there's a typical one of me, but it's just me, is it?

I'm the fox in question

smell what's all around me

leave my own mark saying

I went for a slide on some gravel

and looked up then questioning, and the question

I asked was - 'am I just playing?'

there was a human there I asked

the fact that the human wanted me dead

brought me into its imagination

and that's the place you get a soul

at least I got one next

now here's another scene we've got to

the way you dream or on a screen

who am I after all?

anyway we're there

it's a gully of the kind where you might look out for

just for for instance some chicken dinner

that's me looking out

and the soul I've been given

it has a life of its own

it sits up inside and because of that

this 'I' is speaking with you now

which is to say I am

and just then, so as not to be seen, so as not be heard

(humans, remember)

I stop dead still

that's to survive, to not be a target

it's by this means I am in a moment

moment is a kind of basking for the soul

and in that reverie

I can smell what's in the shadows

I can hear honey working up in the trees

in other words the finding of things is not how you could ever expect

because one thing is with another

because another leads there

you're not

but still I can try to make you understand

reverie leads to romance

there are other foxes, I won't say by name

(we don't have them anyway)

but trust me there's another fox,

attracting this one me, I'm with and we're quick

it's 'making love', do you say?

more nose than anything

and let me tell you now how any single smell has its own little history

a first whiff shatters into time, won't come back from there

but you do remember

the way you think of it is as if your skin were something you could think

as if that first sniff of the thing were settled with you, were yours

and light as your own fur

something you have with you I mean

it's night now and the humans have torches to find us

come down the gully with their awkward careful motion,

they are hunting for us with four-legs just like them

and closer and closer, the dog smells of gunshot

comes in a circle around me

that smell makes me sick, waves of it come over me

I am where the dog could see and so I make myself quite still

it's the ears alert that turn to point faster than a little bird

though I am proud

in order to live, I must play now at not living

at not existing at all

there's only my heartbeat any creature has

in other respects I'm not there

at least this is what I attempt

I have to live this tactic

have to be ambiguous

the way things are in words and dreams

spring is many

is season is verb made noun

but cannot pounce

or possibly the source is bung

but that is for example

I didn't get away with being otherwise than

or just myself invisible

I mean that they could smell me

or else it was something like seeing

and all that came from that was

I was already known

the way you know your hands

to use, hold and obey

or colours

we can call them

these are gods in the machine

we are