by Joel Harris
Changes of shape, new forms, are the theme which my spirit
impels me now to recite.
—Ovid, Metamorphoses
Papa Bois, horned shepherd of the forest,
reel me in as a carp to your ungulate grasp.
Entrance me with your hallowed bull horn,
drown my ears in the gurgle of Ortoire’s torrent
that I may lose myself to vermouth; a Dionysian trance,
that I may cede control; its accouterments, its pretensions.
Papa Bois, I beseech you—grant me my heart’s desire.
Render me a skinwalker, a walking hex impervious to white ash.
Render me a demiKraken, a Proteus in the Nyx of night.
Render me peeling bark; Bay Rum’s dark, glossy leaves.
Render me the Northern Range, a rapturous green morning;
mourning shrined in ash, basalt, breccia, shist and limestone.
Render me primal and virginal; Carboniferous in checkered time.
The time before 1492, the time before Raleigh anchored at Paracoa.
I want to be Parico’s crystal stream snailing through the deep south.
I want to shape-shift into a Nepoyan tribe of miscellaneous pebbles;
the shredded fig leaves yellowing at the edges from benign neglect,
flushed away to the sandbox of a bittersweet oblivion.
I want to wear the incarnadine bougainvillea of the scarlet ibis,
the bloodied plumes peacocked to mangrove islets
like ribbons ribbed to a lit Christmas pine.
I want to branch into maidenhair ferns, their arching fronds.
Under Papa Bois’ spell, I’ll plunge into Spanish Cedar’s hermetical door.
There I’ll uncover hidden stairs; the hidden road to El Dorado.
In this New World, I’ll be the dingy tunnels in Cumaca’s Cave,
a fanged precipitation of stalactite hardened to kidney stones.
I’ll be reborn as a douen, a haunted child suckled in Valencia’s forest.