Translation of a Cave

Cro-Magnon needed a cave like we need a rear-view mirror.  The underworld

much closer than it appears. Gaining fast.  A bison could paint us into a

corner.  A Cadillac could crack a skull.  We descend long enough to feel the

cold in our pre-history.  This far inside, what matters beyond the dark?

There’s an erratic outdoorness to this artifice.  It hurts to think it we

never left the belly of the beast.  This rock could fall in and puncture the

planet.  Make it fizz like so many toilets flushed all at once.  We enter

the gate that opens our hominid for homecoming.  A pilgrimage to a primary

crisis, a mega-fauna trance.  The deer’s haughty throat, the horse’s

mournful thighs.  The bull’s eye an eye.  Out of sight.  Out of mind.

Cognition beats a bison, no matter how you hunt it.  Meaning will fix

the manganese to the mammoth.  The thrill of leaving is, we can take the

blindfold off.  Leave the ochre behind.  Inside an older self that makes us

presentable.  Precocious even.  We don’t dig in all this dirt.

**

Mike Rollin is counting the days until the Bush bunch is gone gone and gone and we can take our habeas corpus back, but he's not holding his breath.

He’s had recent poems in Bombay Gin, Northwest Review, Atlanta Review, and

New Orleans Review. He lives in Minneapolis in fabulous Powderhorn Park, and serves the urges of art and community on the board of the Powderhorn Writers Festival.

Archived at http://lit.konundrum.com/poetry/rollinm_poems.php