I am ill at ease
with the cave paintings at Lascaux.
Those well-muscled bison
Like handmade thunder
and horses
Whose tumbling red ochre bodies breathe the cold rock
Rippling into warm-blooded life
A chaos of living motion
with which
men and women relegated to prehistory
(some sinister shadow self known only in dispassionate geologic terms)
Meditated upon their separation from the animal world
An echo of instinct and deep knowing
of absolute belonging to the garden
The natural world
Which we are told we lost forever with the inexplicable
And imponderable adoption (evolution?) of consciousness.

Now we are left to think:
What sublime trauma!
To have separated our feeble and tepid lifetimes
from the earth’s own ragged heartbeat
Its ligaments of earth and water
Its proud spine of Precambrian stone
And the silent, cataclysmic power of the animals
Which we will forever sing about, write about, dream about.
I remember the airplane taking off
From our prairie terminus,
And watching a hawk boldly spring into the summer sky
Buoyant,
Jubilant,
without a sound,
Just before the jet engine roared its mechanical fanfare
And I lamented that I could only experience flight
From inside this cold metal box
A porcelain eggshell
This crude caricature of the hawk’s anonymous art.

Our playacting at wilderness games
Was cruelly refuted by the dark
Black-pearl plumage
Undulant and uncompromising
Like the bottom of the ocean,
Of a raven we had first thought uncommonly bold
Then gruesomely injured
By an improvident passing truck
Useless leg dangling mockingly
Mangled wing like a bent coat hanger.
Flightless and without the dignity of tree-top,
This bird waiting quietly for night to fall.
(as if this, for it, was a day like any other)
How light it seemed
its feathered bones so brittle
So black and so blue
A fragile thing more fit for a china shop
Than a burnt-out Kootenay lakeshore.

Later it seemed
no coincidence
that we had earlier (without a thought) laughed aloud at the proposed meeting of Jesus and Nanabush
Or recalled the mythic wonder
of solemn, stoic, and all-at-once laughing Raven
maniacal and defiant, calm and unwitting
prying open the primordial clamshell
only to find wriggling fleshy people
writhing out into the world
owing forever the debt of our existence
to his fatal curiousity