Muskrats, Possums, and Bird-Eating Spiders

"I preferred books of poetry, since they allowed more breaks for spying. . . . A spy who, once again, didn't know what he wanted to find." ~ Alejandro Zambra

"In an infinite universe, anything is possible but that doesn't make it probable." ~ Nick Lane

"His failures went unnoticed, his successes earned him no praise." ~ Salman Rushdie

"It is disturbingly like watching . . . slow possession by a demon." ~ Helen MacDonald

"Happy as you go in, sad when you leave!" ~ Hans Dudeldee

Too many quotations will spoil the broth.
We sneeze, inhaling these little black flecks,
Hurting our ribs, and our souls fly from us.

They were never ours anyway. The names
That the conscientious attach to them,
That the sly hide away, never owned them.

Souls are. Spiced languages invented them.
They're our ghosts, after all, the great spirit
We inhale piously and then explode

Like the spores of a fungus, exploding
Pollen carried on the wind, on the back
Of a bat, the wings of a bumblebee.

The bat doesn't own the pollen, the spores
Disinterested in even the wind.
Bumblebees didn't invent the triggers

Of orchids and other dependent things.
Humans, as such, as bodies here and there,
Never planned to bear the seeds of monsters

Any more than the genes of the microbes
We also carry, dancing Totentanz
To the tune of endless Armageddon

In an infinite universe of myth,
Provocations, impossibilities
(Something impossible must be

Impossible still in infinity
For infinity to include the thought
Of an impossibility), and lies.

There are no single spies, only whole hosts
Of spies like bright beetles, armies of poems,
Fortresses of fairy tales surrounded

By blooming, buzzing forests primeval,
All ranged against the lust of likelihood.
The secret ingredient is not there

But in the silent, hunting predator,
Feathered in hunger, rock, water, and bone,
Saturn fond of anonymous children.