The Panther scales above the infirmity of the jungle
like a reverent vicar, in her mouth
she clutches an infant. To some this is
the most intoxicating world—so long as you don’t mind
a little ruse, how could there be a day in your whole life
that doesn’t consist of a flurry of happiness?
Below, game lopes abundantly as the ocean tributaries,
each frolicking along a distinctive course, not that
she ever really ruminates over them, or anything else.
The panther has never had to digest a fable,
though her existence propagates an analogous terror.
When predators raid her hearth, they remain
ephemeral, irrelevant – her insatiable hunger the only story
she has ever managed to revisit.
Your skin will never feel her eyes. I cannot say
she is wrong. Piously she prepares her supper,
with its meager, undeveloped vigor, erupting
a contented roar in the conversion of its properties.
She exists the product of her kind, the natural order her excuse
as she scales back above the inconsequence of the jungle
again, to do the same thing
(as I’d longed to do something, anything) perfectly.