Scrape

IT is horror in its sickly, sallow pelt,
which sags in haggard clumps from
the mass of it. It sheds grotesquely,
in the manner of a wizening corpse:
coarse mats droop grayish from the
knotted sinew, like skin off of bone.

It drags its ashen bone cage, flea-bitten, bilious.
It wears its coal, burning low, as a dying ember.
The sunken and charred pits of the fireless eyes
peer, pupilless, from a face cast long in shadow.

It is not warmth.
It will not blink.

It is a hungering thing with a yawning appetite.
The frothing jaws yet slaver in a seething spittle.
The pitchy eyes haunt their unpolished hollows.
The patchy flesh is mottled with a discoloration.

Its behemothic silhouette looms,
and the beast lumbers its weight
through creeping, starless wood.

And its voice, like snapping bone,
swells, rasping, from the throat:

"Nothing here is sacred.
"Nothing soft will stay."

We christen it—if cruelly.
We curse it with wounds.

For to give it any name at all,
I tell you, is a kindness undue.

And the skin-changer sloughs its ursine shape,
and the countenance, exposed, turns a curious
button nose to the sky and inhales its stale air.

The beorning-cub is more skeletal, even, than I
might have guessed—the dismal skin wants for
a healthy bloom over gaunt cheeks and freckles
in the manner of little swamp tracks,
which whelm the meager space of a child's face.
Lackluster braids tumble to a glassy-eyed smile,
spill o'er in a cascade to conceal scar and scrape.

And I recall a warning
—nothing soft will stay.