Borrego
A boney bunch they are,
Toe-tipping,
teetering, and wary,
toddling over slender self-made paths.
Horned-selves
parading high above the dappled desert floor,
above the stalagmitic honey-caves
adorned with combs the size of boars
and sticky-drip-traps.
Above, they tramp.
Above the filagrees of palm
and desert willow
and the drizzled valley.
They think themselves creators of all this,
their universe
Because? Because all they see is of them
and ever more has been.
They’ve never heard the
bleat of foreign
mountain sheep
Nor news of other bovidae
Save one:
A bitter goat invader
wandered there and died of thirst.
A fellow coprinae, named Anza.
A Basque, they say,
successful til it
made a turn and,
lost its herd,
its sure-foot tribe,
its prong-ed kin.
And when his bones were clean
and bleached
he looked just like the others.
LLyn De Danaan
June 22, 2018
