Radiance

with thanks to Rosa Von Praunheim

"… it’s strange to kill
for the sudden feel of life.
The danger is to moralize that strangeness.”— Robert Hass

Because the bullets issued by the German
marksmen started missing Jews, they fired up
the ovens. I can imagine that last shot
going astray at the moment the lieutenant
might have concluded his cloudy version of heaven
or see the human blur of heads muttering
in snow: warnum machen wir das? the way I think
the blind pursuit of deer must speak
dumb-hushed to the mind of who startles it.
The setup is to focus on one hair before
the animal makes wholly sense—the sudden feel
of having an extravagance of target
can pull you like a hood through trees.
But is it any different than the random scores
in slaughter houses: the rain of hammerblows
for the natural dimming time in interest?
It’s an old story: perfecting the volunteer.
The head of the cow starts to shiver
like the family dog and a light happens
behind its eyes and you don’t want
to be the one to break it. You don’t want
to be the last thing alive the light would see.
Maybe it’s just too hard to look at finally: life
shining in a head. But I want to know what
it’s like. I want to know how the mind of a killer
can suddenly regain consciousness and how
that instinct swerves one instant, is lost
and then resurfaces: radiant. I want to know
how you kill again after knowing it—after knowing
that one 1/100th of radiance is radiance.