Claire Taylor, Bones of an Unknown Beast, 2017 (Artist Website)
Watercolor, gouache, colored pencil, gel pen
Giclee print available here
In this intangible wood something sings, dark
and star-grieved.
O dove. O sparrow. O forest hare:
little purse of shadowed velvet.
Even the leaf-colored frog [dead leaf, sere leaf, leaf
with poison veins,
the hand-of-a-woman-betrayed leaf]
holds a stillness in its lubricious limbs,
when that strange note pins itself to the night's throat.
Here wild figs split humble skins, expose ripe, vulval
meat then drop and wither.
Beneath the leafmold, the vivid moss--
a seethe of life: beetles, skinks, jeweled flies.
And among the boughs the verbs of nightbirds; the delicate
semaphore of bats [not black, no, but shoe-leather-brown,
fawn-silk, mud-dapple]
And here a beast cries.
Something, among this foliate fretwork of scrim-bark
and vine, winnows all its fury, all its passion
into a hurt that upfurls from wound to song.
A woman might stroke such a wound
over and over with her thumb, her mouth brimming
with snared fox, gutshot deer.
A woman might lie bleeding
in this wood, beneath the night
with its tourniquet of stars.