A Brief History of the World According to Goats

In the Fertile Crescent, goats domesticated humans to learn goat tongue
but now are domesticated for slaughter

Goats dream in the equivalent of seven human hours & by this estimation
goats will render human imagination obsolete in 10,000 years

Goats count human days in lashes

Damascus goats look the way they do because they ate of God’s Golden Heart

It’s been said when you eat a goat’s eye you dream of its life

The hock has cured ailments, pastern for anguish, flank for love

A normal presentation of a kid birth signals a plentiful harvest

Famine has been preceded by an abnormal herd

A kid born polycephalic will be abandoned by its mother

Goats are born with panoramic vision to see death

Goats plan for war as does any animal

This is a poem about rot

Cain

Only Abel saw headless goats in the swirling eddies
the summer we were grown enough to ride
our bikes past the stop sign. Truth is I trust my memory
more than I should: two sisters having separate girlhoods
to say they survived. We had so much fun before
we understood the rules. I tell this to the bat-eared fox
with its hindquarters in the maw of another animal,
its left orbital bone, crushed. Reprieved by no shade,
no vegetation, safe for the husk of tree hollowed out from rot.
I look to the fox, its throat shredded into red whimsy
and say aloud, I too can be cruel sometimes. Above, a red dress torn
and snagged on its branches. So, this is grief:
stillness before devastation. They never found her alive—
the girl Abel was with that day. Vulpine creature, I bare no
salvation for you to consume. If mercy is a decisive blade,
then let me deliver you. Just as I did Abel in a dream,
where I say, Let’s go out into the field, sister. Her: in a nightgown
surrendering to the wind’s grasp —
cool nightfall gutted us with moonlight. I say Follow
and she does because I say my hands will bring her closer
to Baba’s glory. We walk into the open mouth of dusk.
Her: holding my hand & I almost felt my humanity
from the well inside me come back up where I push
it down; she trusts me to be her shepherd—
to lead her beside still waters. When I felt the misericorde
give way, the neck bone doubles under my tending,
and it felt good to know a taste of God’s might.
Call me merciless lover. Sister. Equalizer.
She who plucks weeds before they threatened the harvest.
She who isn’t afraid of her gluttonous hands.

Image © Europeana

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