Cougnac

The mutilated man shall mount the mammoth,
shall mount and
shall enter the mammoth’s head.
The man’s head shall pierce the mammoth’s brain,
the man’s head and mutilated body
shall become the mammoth’s animating soul
and a lance shall now spit mammoth soul and skull.

This is how we get into animals,
how we project ourselves as versa
into the vice of animal stone.
This is how we lance our otherness
on the winch of vice versa.

The self,
pupa run through six times, penguin-finned,
in its mammoth head
chrysalis.

The self,
hybridizing amoeba jerking to
its wounds,
peering forth from its mammoth
cradle as if
off the planet’s edge.

What a drop
25,000 years compose!
What a Fall
from man exterior to mammoth
to man lodged
mutilated in
this hybrid head.

[Gourdon, 2007]

FROM Anticline (Black Widow Press, 2010)

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