Diptych

Mutable history as seen in a second-string museum,
details become sublimated under dust-lidded

dioramas. A spread-eagled grey squirrel straddled
with a red squirrel's tail. Splayed for all the world.

Pinned down along with other half-done juxtapositions.
I've got one of these centaurs in my own front yard.

He makes me nervous when he runs as if
hoping to escape from his inborn recessive flames.

In a more extravagant installation, a miniature
she-goat, grazing on diurnal hibiscus flowers,

opens up to the exhibition of the forest.
And over here we have the bifurcated

V of taxidermic geese superimposed over
the grayed-down background of a fighter plane.

There's nothing new under the sun and so on.
All go which go in noisome abandon.

Including an entire afternoon. Until we return
to the easily shed and forgotten as now becomes

fanciful through the recollection of critical animals.
Highly charged, phantasmagorical griffons,

half mammal half talon, potent and
physical as anything we spread out to apprehend.