We are going somewhere.
That is all.
The surface is harder than field,
the smell is wrong,
there is noise from below
that does not mean anything we know,
but the body moves
because the body knows
to move,
because movement is not decision
so much as continuation,
the way breathing continues,
the way the herd continues,
one body following warmth
of the body ahead.
We do not know we are ascending.
We know the angle of the ground
under our hooves.
We know the one in front
is still moving.
That is enough.
The boys are there.
We know that too —
the particular electricity of watching,
the way attention has pressure,
the way humans leak intention
from every part of themselves
and think they are being still.
But they are not for us.
They are just another condition,
like wind,
like smell of rain coming,
like the low sound the ground makes
near water.
We do not perform.
We never performed.
Berger said you withdrew from us
the moment you no longer needed us,
that the look across the fence
became one-sided,
became yours,
became a mirror
you held up to yourselves
and called nature.
We did not withdraw.
We never withdrew.
We were always just here,
doing this,
going somewhere,
in the way that going somewhere
has always meant for us —
not arrival,
not spectacle,
not the clean narrative arc
your minds require,
just the next step,
and the one after,
and the warmth of the one ahead.
Morton would say
you cannot help it —
the mesh of things
is too large for the human eye
to hold without frame,
and so you make us theater,
make the swarm a wonder,
make the migration a story
with a beginning and an end
and a meaning
that was never ours to give.
We are not indifferent to you.
Indifference would require
that we first considered you central.
We are only
moving.
The overpass beneath our hooves
was not made for us.
We do not know that.
We know it holds.
The boys point.
One laughs.
One goes quiet in a way
that might, in twenty years,
become a thought.
We go over the top
and begin to descend
the other side
where they cannot see us anymore
and we continue
exactly as before
because we were never
performing.
We were never
for them.
We were going somewhere.
That is all.
That was always all.
