Overpass

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.