M I R A G E
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A Magical Realism Ecology Poem Lavendra Copen Let’s imagine the bullet misses this time, shatters rock instead of rib. Let’s imagine the pronghorn leaps away, lives to love another day, and pronks in celebration when his youngsters sprout their horn buds. And let’s imagine the coyote doesn’t eat the poisoned hawk who ate the poisoned mouse who ate the poisoned grain. Just this once there’s some divine intervention — a hail storm, maybe, lightning — and she stays in her den, curling like a crescent moon around her hungry pups. Let’s say, just this once, the duck doesn’t swallow the lead shot for his gullet, to grind up corn and snails, but picks a granite pebble tumbled for ions to just the right size. And a pine branch weakened by the wind falls across the steel-jawed trap and springs it just before the fox pair flow like amber tributaries down to the river to drink. Let’s pretend that water still leaps to sun-shot freedom over beaver dams; that air explodes when a falcon stoops on a pigeon, when an eagle hits a snow goose, and all its feathers go incandescent. Let’s pretend it’s all still there, the sweetness, the antique violence. human destiny, waiting to be manifested.
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