Explication (poem)

Explication

Morbid feet on a ruminant’s road

They are speaking likenesses of nervous rounding

More than an anthropologist’s brush off

An antelope’s roaming is found to be enough

By epoch’s end we have all gone soft

And taken to occupy our cushions

gravely fanning a white layer of flesh

Wise to keep the species afloat

The words we spoke and our movements lost

Their regional accents

For such time as the power of the thought

Mattering drifted as a breeze

Invisible to sift moribund leaves

Galled ones kiting on declining lifts

Of minor breaths sighed out

Sublimations of the organism

Winding down

A ruminant’s road, ancestral road

Captured that they tell the lore

A cored and peeled late Lascaux

Sunk by dewy exhalation

Pup sniffs dumb to the diagnosis

A conceit, is all it was, that they who’d marked down stories

For hoping when reminded to be right

Saw posterity or cared

Explication

And Still

(2018, Stephanie Foster)