The Wheel of Life

Copyright by Tal Liron

The Amur Leopard! The Amur Leopard!
Harried away in his far-off oblast
Nobody knows him, nobody sees
O' the Amur Leopard!
Where are you now that your
Cousins are whiskers
And palm trees are wine
And flesh fishing bone from the river between
O' the Amur Leopard!
Wise as an ass, pities no deer
SHE ATE HER FILL IN A MOUNTAIN PASS
AND EVERYONE SAW
O' the Amur Leopard!
Our factory is broken, no more whistles
No more horse whips
No more boys turning into deer
No more mad barons
An ocean of blood, an ocean of Jews
In that far-off oblast
Motorcycles with whiskers
Splash mad as they cross the ford
Of the Amur Leopard
A button factory
Breaking for lunch as the ford overflows
And then the snow
And then the shaman
THIRSTY AT THE RIVER, LAPPING UP WINTER WATER WITH WHISKERS
On my lap the Amur Leopard
She’s had her full
AND SHE IS YAWNING
In that mountain pass
In that far-off oblast
Where soldiers starved
Harried
O' Amur River
O' Onon
O' Songhua
O' Amgun
O' Nen
O' Lake Hulun
EXTINCT THE AMUR LEOPARD
DEAD IN SAKHALIN
BURIED WITH BARONS
BOYS ENCASED IN ICE

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The Amur Leopard!
Watch how she crosses, land-bound, leaping
Can cut a man in two
That Amur Leopard,
O' and her claws!
Delicate like conifers
Static and snow-bound
O' the Amur Leopard!
She’s not a fan of Al Gore --
Though grateful --
She always votes for the black guy
Like her.
O' and her maw!
Licking her newborn
That bright red placenta
Fur stained with gun oil
O' the Amur Leopard!
Ocean-bound, crawling,
As rare as the Buddha’s frown,
As good cops in the Midwest,
O' if it weren’t for lawyers
She’d be behind bars.
SHE WON’T LET GO OF THE SIKA DEER’S LEG
SHE WON’T TAKE HER EYES OFF THE BIOLOGIST
SHE WON’T REVEAL THE LOCATION OF HER LOVE
Even to postsecret.com
Even to me, her last fan,
Even to the Sun
Rare visitor in this waste.
Rare predator in this quiet town.

+++

The poor Amur Leopard!
Dying and gasping
The last few breaths left in the world
For anyone to breathe,
Her cub is dying and gasping
Oxygen is extinct;
The Amur Leopard is almost extinct;
Black rectangles are the only plentiful commodity
The only multiplying cells
The only color in the physicist’s spectrogram.
O' and her cub is almost dead!
But his belly is full
For the first time in months
O' did you know?
The Amur Leopard’s favorite band is the cure
Her favorite song is The Figurehead:
"As the figurines tighten with spiders inside them"
She is black and she is white,
And she is no more goth than you and I,
O' and her tongue!
Last I saw it flicker at the pub
(We were watching Manchester United with the blokes)
O' and --
One more gasp of air --
She engages the bandhas --
The rarest shakti uncoils --

And the Amur Leopard is extinct.

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Remember her?
The Amur Leopard,
She is extinct.
So extinct
That sketches of her are doubted.
What food did she eat?
Where did she prowl?
Whom did she nuzzle?
The sketches she made are doubted:
Oil, amber, fossils and pawprints.
I just have the muscle memory.
Since then, I’ve been out hunting with
The old Gray Mare,
“Domesticated,” supposedly, but still animal,
And she’s OK, for a girl,
And she sometimes says the right things,
Like, "I love because you got an A,"
Or, "You should be paranoid, because they really are out to get you."
If she becomes extinct
(or goes bad)
There won’t be myths in amber
Or Facebook wall posts
About her, and me, and
Farmwork and
Plowing and
All those sweet things that mares do.
Milk, for example, that can be fermented.
Anyway,
You can find out all about these and other animals in Wikipedia,
Which is where we’ll all end up when
We become extinct.

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The Spider King killed Gaddafi,
And Saddam and his sons,
And is drooling for Assad.
But it’s nothing personal,
It’s just where his web strands now happen to be.
In the past he caught Eichmann
And Hitler and Franco.
They’re all wrapped and waiting to be eaten in the winter.
There was good eatin' in the lands of the Franks, Slavs and Gauls.
Like in that old winter
That cold winter
In the far-off oblast
Where the black river spills into the eastern sea
And the great island’s shore can be seen through the mist.
A wrapped carcass in the ravine
Might be of the Amur Leopard
Or might be of a Nivkh.
But it’s too wet and misty to look and care.
The Spider King pauses and turns,
Delicately pulls his great girth across the straits.
In an abandoned cabin
Parks and waits.

+++

The Spider King died slowly, doing as royalty does.
In the far-off oblast they raised a funeral pyre as tall as the sky.
The smoke trailed off into the moon.
We wore eight-legged masks and danced and ate,
But were too terrified to pray, doing as orphans do:
Sheila sat and watched the grim parade.
Sandra read a confusing poem, slamming it to the ground.
Krista did drugs.
There were murmurs of conspiracy:
The King had abducted himself!
Swallowed himself in his cosmic hunger!
Was devoured by an Amur Leopard!
(Though we all know she is extinct)
Lies upon lies: the King had no enemies except Himself.
And the Black River has never been blacker,
The fog never thicker,
Dead ships piled down, down to the deep-sea trench,
Where poor James Cameron was paying his rich respects.
HE WON’T LET GO OF THE ENSNARED FLY
HE WON’T TAKE HIS EYES OFF THE ANTHROPOLOGIST
HE WON’T SPIN WEBS TO PROTECT HIS EGGS
Respect, o' King!
May your eggs infest the moon and devour it from within!
I call to you now, riding lesser, faster gods,
Imperfect vehicles in this most remote world.

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The landscape collapses
When you’re a Barn Owl,
While mice are as big as mountains,
Convex and concave, with a million billion hairs,
And eyes that shine like tasty galaxies.
And they’re everywhere
As you fly over all the great rivers:
The Dnieper, the Volga,
The Yenisei, the Lena,
(The Amur hurts too much and always will)
To a scene of an ancient crime at the final sea.
Convex and concave, with a million billion hairs,
The grave of a great spider,
King of kings,
The most delicious thing you can never have.
How far have you gone
To this desolate shore,
“Miles in red and kilometres in black”,
And the mice taste different
But are just as juicy,
While you’re just as swift,
Silent,
Elegant
And perceptive
As your species can be.
It is an honor to be food for your young,
And aid your victory in the ongoing
War against extinction.
With great love,
A field mouse.

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Green, grey and river
Down far below
And away there is sea
Seen from this peak
In the Stanovoy mountains
Through bars of a cage
Perched on a stick
The Barn Owl glimpses
The twitch of my whisker
Sniffing for smoke
Rising from Uchur
Trapped in its sleep
Dreaming of mice
Almost drowned in the Lena
Rested its eyes
For the split of a second
And now here we are.
Why are you silent, not rugged and winged?
Why didn’t you struggle against glove and boot?
Old and daft, there are many here like you,
Fed mice by pale laughing children.
Rain is so soft — which oblast?
Is it the one with the Jews?
Or the fierce ones who howl?
Can’t quite see the sea
From here, on a stick.
In the distance a song
About whiskers and feet
That scratch as you swallow.
"That was a good one, tell us another, don’t stop talking,
Cap your stories; if"
Someone, somewhere built a guitar effect for owls,
Maybe we wouldn’t have been trapped.
But you might think differently when winter comes.

+++

"Some escape,"
The Barn Owl’s wings are clipped.
He must claw his way clumsily
Across the plain.
Children sing behind the hills
As they dismember a sheep.
"I must get out of here."
He’s lost in the grasses,
Crawling, pulling, stumbling
Against a bitter wind.
The scent of the sea--
No; all water is gone.
Everything he loved is flattened
And bare.
The Lena, the Orkhon,
The mighty Selenge,
Carry my feathers to the wood
Where I hatched.
Farther away than the farthest oblast,
Resting in sagebrush and rhubarb and clay.
Spiders so small,
Descendents of kings,
He’ll eat just enough to
Survive until dawn.
And then we’ll see.

+++

Having arrived at the beach
She, exhausted, digs
Claws, horns and spines
Into the oily sands.
This is where water meets dunes,
Two kinds of oblast,
Two species of bird,
One of night, one of day.
She plucks and debeaks herself,
But can’t shed the owl.
"I don’t want you to change."
But I want to swim!
But not yet, she’s afraid,
And slides on the surface.
There’s a shape in the depth,
Many-legged and old
--AND AN EGG STILL UNHATCHED--
Slides above and across
To a far-off shore or an island or ripple,
Where birds still have pockets to shelter
Their young,
Unevolved and unshielded
From her kind of virus,
With new beaks and new feathers
And new ways of thinking
And unextinct mice,
So, so juicy,
Like in that dream,
Perched,
Coiled,
Released,
Feathered arrow.
Waking up in a pool of prehistoric liquids,
And the realization that history is all she has left.

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Moments to forget:

When you were decapitated by the children in the dream;
The juiciest mouse, but at what cost;
A bonfire song in a language not heard in thirty thousand years;
Wind tipping feather and the thunder strikes getting closer;
A reflection of a spider in the depths when you drank;
The sinkhole by the moss bed leading to the sealed cave complex;
Cold of granite against beak;
The glint of whisker, moonlight, arrowhead;
Before these humans, when they were not so fast;
When they killed you for a King;
Who said: “You will fly on, but you will be the last of your species”;
Radiation in the river;
Radiation in the embankment;
Radiation in your lungs;
O' and the hoarse whisper of paw upon snow and
The readiness to be eaten.

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To disappoint the biologist
By not being endangered enough,
Nor rare.
Burrowing, healthy,
With adequate night vision,
Sensitivity to particular smells --
Like of that juicy rabbit corpse we stumbled upon last winter --
Or that huge pile of mysterious dung by the pond.
Not special.
But I don’t care if there are fifty post-rock bands that sound just like you,
Or if your hit song is an obvious ripoff of that other one,
Or if in ten years the appeal will be gone.
The Amur leopard was exciting
And they sang about her until the very end
In peer-reviewed journals
And in that book that secured your tenure,
And, well, you know all about appeal.
Night vision good enough to see the outline of a large, slow shape,
Waking up in a burrow,
Heart racing,
Confused
Between last winter and the winter coming soon.