Lion
       

When they stage, finally, its glorious corpse, gloating for the fish-
eye lens—that high-end-Honeywell-Pentax triumphant shot—
their neck veins, strained (plump you could say ), worm & pump
at the strange weight they had not, perhaps, anticipated. Its head
all heft, surprisingly dense, like a flatbed tire
                                                                          takes two men to lift
&, sometimes, more. And where its muzzle had been, its face was
a puddle no light reaches into, but the sun. Which was, it seems,
a mistake of aim. In fact, they had wanted its face, its mane, its eyes
acrylic & fixed, forever, in an oak-paneled den
                                                                            on a wall on which
other eyes, the wood's eyes, too, would be, each, a Dali clock—
seeming to look out: each their own subjugated shape, each warped,
bewildered subject of time. In that room, a certain kind of man
stares back, indifferent: Narcissus amazed at
                                                                        the power
of his power: the pool he had made: exactly that gaze that razed forests
for the railroad that rattled like a chain as it gathered towns
around it in clusters, going west—ferrying a rumor of mineral wealth
in the hills of California, that brown-green chaparral
                                                                                      resembles
(approximately) camo splotchings on the sweat-wicked cap of this
man, in this picture, with his rifle pointing up—as if he'd shoot
the sky in its back if he could. If he could hang it like
                                                                                      a crucifix
to admire its prestige. How it meant, to him, nothing
when someone told him once, a cat, like an ape, tastes like a bullet.

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Copyright © 2019 Brian Tierney All rights reserved
from Southern Indiana Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission