[from The Tether by Carl Phillips]
The Point of the Lambs
“The good lambs
in the yellow barn—the rest
housed in blue.” By
“the rest,” meaning those who
—the guide explained—inevitably
arrive suffering. “For
some do,” he added.
Soft.
Serious. This—like
a new lesson. As to
some among us, it was,
it seemed. The usual
stammer of heart the naïve
tend to, in the face of what finally
is only the world. What
must it be, to pass
thus—clean, stripped—
through a life? What
reluctance the mind
shows on recognizing
that what it approaches
is, at last, the answer
to the very question it knows
now, but
too late,
oh better to never to have never
put forward. What I
mean is we moved
closer,
in,
to the blue barn’s
advertisement—
flaw,
weakness. We
looked in.
Three days, four days
old. Few expected to
finish the evening it was beginning to
be already. And the small
crowd of us
shifting forward, and—
in our shifting uniformly—it
being possible to see how between
us and any
field rendered by a sudden wind
single gesture—kowtow,
upheaval—there was
little difference. Some
took photographs; most
did a stranger thing; touched
briefly, without
distinction, whichever
person stood immediately in
front of, next to. Less
for support than
as remedy or proof or
maybe—given the lambs who
besides dying, were as well
filthy (disease,
waste and, negotiating
the dwindling contract
between the two,
the flies everywhere)—
maybe the touching
concerned curbing the hand’s instinct
to follow the eye, to
confirm vision. Who can
say? I was there—yes—but
I myself touched no one.
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