By BRUCE BOND
After Terrence Malick
When the dinosaur, at the dawn of mercy,
lifts his hoof from the throat of his rival
whose pulse you see, whose eye tells you seas
have parted into the ken of separate selves—
that’s what haunts me most in the film.
My friend too feels it, the fragility of earth,
the after-movie dinner that I owe him
suddenly long in coming, before my birth.
And as we sit at our table on Legacy Drive,
we watch the traffic of couples and talk
for stretches without talking, merely alive,
exposed to dusk that eats its sacrament
of grackles, as if the onset of the dark
submitted each. To all the hunger in it.
Bruce Bond is the author of fifteen books, including For the Lost Cathedral and The Other Sky, as well as four forthcoming volumes.
