The Impossibility of Presence 

Online you encounter footage of a bear

skinning a salmon—the bear’s whole paw

through pink belly. It begins

to assume supreme meaning until 

it does not; the brown bear twists its head;  

you return to void. Each day 

you bathe as though anointing your body 

for union. You long to be 

a student again, in your lean years and with no 

respect for the material, forever late to class, 

the important assignment missing—the need 

for discipline. In the complete absence of motive 

you suck down raspberry tea. You privately suspect 

there exists an uncontaminated tea 

with hidden faculties, logged away 

in an archive somewhere. You look out 

from your rented attic window and think of the other 

abstracted tastes—safe and saved 

from nothing—precariously placed on a flat, 

infinite surface. What you failed to consider: 

the world outside; your illusory autonomy; 

the impossibility of presence. You are near resolving

yourself to wallow in this erotic pain when 

you find a mouse, its body broken, breathing 

scarcely, you lift it 

on a cloth, careful not 

to touch the dead or dying. You try 

to deposit the creature

in the grass, its small 

claw clutches the fabric.