When I sit up from sleep and swing my legs over the side of
the flat world,
then push down with my palms to heave my weight up,
the bed makes a cry, not like an animal, not like a person,
but like metal being taken from its underground home,
the spiral torque of an iron spring.
It isn’t true I was ever anything like an eland.
My young (I use you again here easily, my dearest ones,
as if I have no respect for human rights)
did not nurse standing up on four legs, did not tup
from a soft leather gourd between ungulate hind legs,
though I had been a leaper, back when my body took
shapes like drifts of mist above a pond fed by a
narrow long waterfall.
