On witnessing a wildebeest cull and receiving a carcass donated
for biomechanical study

We heard them before we saw them: their war

drum gallop rumbling low at our approach,

manes and horns dissolved in moonless darkness

as our pickup pulled to a halt. Our sight

clung to the reach of headlights which conjured

out of the night a herd of candle flames,

bodiless eyes ensorcelled by high beams.

And as those agile glints circled in front

of our truck, above I found them mirrored

by the million, as if glimmers had left

the sky to haunt the veld with hammer-hoofed

thunder—a vision of night animate

with wonder and myth witnessed in the dark,

my eyes whetted by nocturnal spectres.

*

The sun subjecting curved flanks to our sight,

we excavate a barrow of flesh stilled,

dousing the ribs’ caged shadows with daylight.

Leaking small puddles, machinery run

on warm blood and fired by heartbeats grows cold,

as our red-slicked hands proceed to harvest

fresh knowledge on galloping’s mechanics:

legs and trunk part at the bidding of knives,

yielding to study the adaptations

powering footfalls across the Karoo.

We translate limbs from muscle to motor,

their hoof prints stripped of the new moon’s spirits—

On my left, I glimpse the wildebeest’s head,

eyeballs snuffed out and dulled with the night’s cull.

—After Miroslav Holub’s “Encyclopaedia: sum of all knowledge”
(trans. Ewald Osers)