How to Be Eaten by a Lion. Michael Johnson

his snake,

      a creature who spoke the only language it knew.

      In Praise of the Village Idiot

      Torrents of sun from mica on the hedges,

      the quartz driveways framed in avocados.

      Babuleo and his anklebells long overdue.

      Rumour has him in a new shirt, a jungle green.

      Rumour has him radiant.

      It will not last, for he’s not what we want him to be.

      He spies through windows, eats our garbage,

      his testes dangling from torn shorts.

      Someone’s sure to get him new ones

      because they can’t handle his immodesty,

      his seeming carelessness.

      They don’t realize he knows no other way.

      He sucks clay because it tastes good,

      a saltiness he’s found nothing better than.

      And his garbage meals shuck their ferment

      to his delight—all tasting like gifts.

      His anklebells sound his coming

      and kids badger him where he goes.

      He seethes and curses them,

      their elusive ridicule, their cruel normality.

      His gibberish is a longing, a palpable desire.

      That he could speak such words,

      find the right invective, some sweet slang.

      Desire that he could just talk.

      Then there are days—today perhaps—

      when he finds a voice and sings,

      a hollow rasping where his face speaks beauty,

      blissful repose—a truce.

      He makes fluent sense, a soulful parlance,

      like Beethoven to his own deaf ear,

      as though he’s always spoken perfectly,

      never said anything else, as though he, even now,

      was just wondering: Did I make music today?

      The Volcanologist’s Lament

      Living things know the sound of their hour.

      The stormchaser knows the wind calling,

      the eye’s silence before the hammerfall.

      For the hellfighter, the sudden company

      of fire, oil turned to tongues that lick the dust

      with flame. For rockhounds the earth’s

      seismic bitchings, stones tumbling from Earth’s

      molten bruise. In all our hours

      can one find more haunting a thrall than the dust

      and shockwall closing over those calling

      for help? Such images inevitably accompany

      us into the grave: the fall

      of lavasilk, magma’s chaotic freefall

      through the sky’s strata to reclaim the earth.

      A nightly pillar of fire to accompany

      us, a pillar of cloud by day—what ashen hour

      could pass without some stony lord calling

      gravely from the depths? This sweet dust.

      They say we are raised from dust.

      The honey-heft of all the fruit fallen

      in the orchards, the soil calling

      commands of ferment and rot, the earth

      reclaiming all. Everything is the hour

      of his supper. We are his company,

      his very wine and bread. We are a company

      of fools for mistaking the holiness of dust.

      Land, property, certainly. Not an hour

      of these passes unbartered in the rise and fall

      of markets and monies, but the earth

      goes unheard. That lithic heart calling

      its pulse up through the plates, calling

      its wrath through the faults: I keep company

      with gods, why do you not listen? This earth

      is such a terrible loneliness. Built of dust,

      they say. I’m just a man, bound to fall.

      Why care without another to share the hours?

      O firestone, I’ve unearthed nothing. O enemy hour,

      when comes calling my friend in the fall,

      my company into the country of dust?

      The Volcanologist’s Lament II

      From the distress of the undressed—

      unbedded rocks, tripped-over tree limbs—

      scurrisome bugs and so-many-legged pedes

      unhomed: life is in the running fight,

      that telltale scatter of things driven to endure.

      We all know the reaper’s come-hither claw wag.

      Without cipher, the flourish and thrall offers so little,

      yet faced with lavasilk on the slopes, we stare.

      What has the flame to offer?

      Survival is luck and love of oneself,

      timing, smarts, a pinch of learned-the-hard-way.

      Lava can warm you with the heat of all it has burned.

      What it gives, it has taken.

      Rainmaker

      They called you in their need,

      none believing in your ricketed

      legs and bird bones, the desiccated

      eagle head you carried.

      You shook your lion-tail sceptre

      at their quiet ridicule,

      strutted your beads and spat the dark fuel

      of your prayers into the fire.

      After the thunder and cloudgrace,

      were they tears on weathered faces

      laughing their thanks? Did they

      ever believe in you rainmaker—

      or was it enough they cried, Asante!

      Asante! and drank the water?

      How to Be Eaten by a Lion

      for Claire Davis

      If you hear the rush, the swish of mottled sand

      and dust kicked up under the striving paws,

      its cessation, falling into the sharp and brittle grass

      like the tick of a tin roof under sun

      or hint of rain that nightly wakes you,

      try to stand your ground. Try not to scream,

      for it devalues you. That tawny head and burled

      mange, the flattened ears of its sleek engine

      will