As Nassim Taleb had it, waiting for the ax, / a man stretching past the farthest tendrils of his ken, / lovers of liars, stargazers in the war, / candles burning bright and so on. / The truth is that we pity the Thanksgiving Turkey not for the ax / but for the easy life before it, / or not the ease exactly but the haplessness
of livestock, / fenced off from meaning, / a cave life, / perhaps seeing truth for the first time / in the specular shine of an ax already / night skied with the blood of her sisters, / when on a November day, amid the colors, / the turkey in fact learns that the past was prelapsarian . . .