One day
a mosquito lands
on the ashen planet of your ankle,
claims this land
in the name of Queen Whichever,
or perhaps God—
not God in the abstract,
but the immense
expanding and contracting
hide
of one heartsick African
elephant in particular—whereupon
it plants a funny kind
of flag, and makes to
refuel the ship before blast-off.
You—the you who
construes this
on a green-painted zoo bench—
you are not God.
You are no one
to it: sheer alien surface,
concealing new potentialities
of the most essential resources.
It
is most definitely
nothing to you.
Not even this. This
is artifice; another kind
of surface,
a different kind of exhibit.
The unreconstructed
truth—you never even
noticed it.
