Osiris

Summer lifted its warm breath into the dead

Fox’s mouth. The silence, wild as ants

Performing their sturdy, steadfast but brief

Interviews of its various offices

& orifices. They concluded nothing

Other than its flesh. Sheaf by sheaf, the ants

Took the fox into their hole in the earth

To live with them in the dark not as the dead

Normally live in the earth, quiet as a thief

In the thrall of touching paradise, but live

As a God who could be broken into bread,

Leaf by leaf, grain by golden grain,

Served from one mouth to another, black

As power and the milk one animal knits

Out of another and gives. Give. I would

Have left the dead in the previous winter

Where they had lived beneath the pigeon’s wing

& lifted it up into the anaphora of the gray

Sun rising, but the dead keep walking

Across the bridge of dust trembling between us,

The dust in me calling to the dust they be-

Come, so now when I hike the dry hillocks

Opening the green, green-yellow, yellow-brown

Doors of the grass creaking beneath my feet,

I enter as, when, where called, some cause of light

To touch, and the dead — fox or feral father,

God — throw out their skull, their yip and hard

Yammer stammering in the grass, and I

Turn toward their breath on things, some light

To touch without guard or gate, some light without.