how to be eaten by a lion
Copyright © Michael Johnson, 2016
all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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Gibsons, BC v0n 1v0
Canada
cover design & typography: Carleton Wilson
Nightwood Editions acknowledges financial support from
the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and
the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publisher’s Tax Credit.
This book has been produced on 100% post-consumer recycled,
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ISBN 13: 978-0-88971-318-5
ISBN 10: 0-88971-318-9
for Stéf, mon amour
&
for my mother and father
We are the song
death takes its own time
singing.
—Robert Hass
Ornithos
for Robert Wrigley
Sing of larksongs in the brambles and mud cities,
the Kivu lakeshore rookeries
along those cooled cradles of magma.
Sing the birthplace of death and drought,
of baobabs and jacaranda buds,
the stump-rumped waddle of dabchick
and duck, shag and scissorbill,
their heron wet cousins strutting rivers.
You brittle bastards—
lovebird, greenshank, tambourine dove,
tinkerbird, oxpecker, little leaflove—
you are great in your littleness,
your hover and yaw, the way you bleed
the light your bodies are made of.
We envy, we dream, we sun in your splendour,
the sky built into your bones.
O bird, bird of prey,
of prance and shimmer on the thermals.
Kingfisher, nightjar, swift and shrike,
honeyguide, harrier, curlew and crake,
coo and I will echo, telling my lips:
Go on, go on, these are your wings.
In Praise of Pain
Fluent in dialects of mantis and chameleon,
we lay reading cloud hieroglyphs,
listening to insects gossip in the grass
beneath the largest nest we’d ever seen.
We believed beetles the ant-world gods,
all inkblot and iridescence and poise—
dung, rhino, stag—surely immortal.
But our friend’s goliath had died that day.
Too out of its element, its rainforest home
where leopards whiskered the shadows.
No one mentioned loneliness.
The innumerable live, the rare die.
A million wasps, one less was not tragic.
So we visited that nest with stoic anger,
six kids with slingshots, six missiles, all true.
One cleft the papery hull and lit their rage.
Our second salvo plummeted the nest
to a marakuja thicket, were it emerged,
rolling, gathering momentum
toward the terraces and workwomen.
And we, watching, fired on. We anticipated pain
as they welled in a demented cloud.
Instead, they went to work on the women,
and followed them, screaming, to the creek.
And this one girl resurfaced—
the pastor’s lessons fresh in her:
in all things praise Him—screaming praises
to the wasps, the pain, through her tears:
Bwana asifiwe! Praise the Lord.
Vengeance
They later called it nyoka—serpent—
a mamba no one had seen the equal of.
They skewered it with rebar and watched it writhe.
They began with delicious nonchalance,
laying bets on who would deliver the coup de grâce.
With slingshots and bearing balls
the boys inched up the tail break by bruise,
aiming short to spark and shrapnel in the gravel.
They loved quartz smoke like some vital ingredient
in the bread of vengeance.
Elders squatted, whittling blowgun arrows,
imploring everyone to not hasten this gift,
not cheat them of their rightful portion.
That is how he found them, the pastor.
He glared about, daring anyone
to question his compassion,
as he gripped the rebar, a piece he knew stolen,
and angered more, unplanted it
and bent as if to pick up the limp body
when it struck. Men beat it to pieces.
His hand burned, he said. He sank to his knees
while they ran for the campus nurse.
That