The Guinea Pig and the Green Balloon

I approached the luminous stranger who came to me

from darkness in a gown of lettuce leaves, in a velvet

cloak of green that appeared at first another piece of dark,

but pulled apart into the glow-sphere that danced

in swaying steps, the lucent majesty that slipped toward me

from the reigning silence black above my cage.

Oh extravagant—and were my teeth too sharp to greet

or sharp enough? I do not understand now what was meant

to happen and what was a mistake—but know the bursting,

the sickening snap of ecstasy wrenched back to the body

and the green gown flung in crippled circles traced

like diagrams of wasting moons above my head—or portals

to another world, I thought, but as I thought, the shriek

dissolved, the body crumpled from the air and landed

on its side beneath the salt lick. All night I tended

the wasted skin and careful, brought it water,

alfalfa, made a bed of cedar chips and tried to gather

molecules of breath that floated from the plant shelf.

When I remembered morning, I began to cry, began to pray

for night to stay until the green took shape again

and if that shape were gone, I prayed for night

to stay, to be held in the same forever-dark

in which I first looked up and saw the gentle body,

and saw the graceful swaying of the stranger coming

as if for me—now I do not know—but then,

as if for me, and all my loneliness gone.

Source: What Animal (University of Georgia Press, 2003)