POETRY
SEPTEMBER 2018
Vis Inertiae
To the jaguar at the Museum of Natural History
by MAXIMILIANE DONICHT
You appear
ears-first,
bulk of muscle with broad shoulders, your jaws
made for splitting the world’s skull, gutted,
skin stretched & stuffed, as thin morning
pours over God’s chipped incisor,
the distant mountain, spurs
of promise, but the valley still pinched
in bruises of shade.
Over aeons you have rounded, compacted;
your limbs shorter, face less angular, mossy ponds of your irises
swallowed by sap.
Hardened, here, after all that. Somewhere
you are ready to cannon
into the dilating valley or hunker down
and thaw into the dark
drum again
that thrums without glass
or buckets of amber eyes:
old spark born back
into the purring pyre, the earth
alive again, incarnate with the reentry
of your ore into its vein.
Maximiliane Donicht
Maximiliane Donicht is from Munich, Germany, and is the author of Bees of the Invisible (Finishing Line Press). She once worked as a pastry chef in Paris, practiced classical Japanese swordsmanship in New York, and now lives in Taipei, where she eats an ungodly amount of purple sweet potatoes. She holds an MFA in poetry and literary translation from Columbia University. Her poetry has appeared in Ecotone, Cold Mountain Review, The London Journal of Fiction, and Bone Bouquet, among others. Her translations have been published in Gulf Coast Journal and online at The Grief Diaries and Columbia Journal. Her translation of Dr. Thomas Höllmann's "The Chinese Script" was published by Columbia University Press. Her website is maximiliane.co.uk.