https://www.wordforword.info/vol40/Duckler.html
I sent the goat of my stubbornness off to Azazel
but that goat kept coming back
tapping on the door with hairy hoof.
So, I marked the goat urgent and read me first
and sat back in the tavern among red cups, victorious.
But the goat returned and stood dumbly
in the courtyard, where a child scratched its forehead of coarse hair,
and it bleated a frustrated groan
that sounded like what grass might scream,
when pulled from the roots, separated from tender ground.
Outside the goat goofily chewed,
inside I slammed tables and sent books skyward
and in a lavish, enraged script wrote to Azazel:
Look, will you not take this expiated fucking goat,
according to agreed procedure, off my stiff neck!
Night fell and at three stars
I opened my shutters and the goat stood at my very bed
and (though no one will believe me) opened its long lips
and said (in the voice of an actor) Listen, pilgrim
I am now and have always been
a herder of shepherds, sending them into the high mountains,
looking for the old fragments. I pray from my pupils,
which see panoramically, with minimal blind spots
and kneel to where I am going
based on the map of where I have been.
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