pulled free and was thrown upon the ground.

Then the farmer knelt down and punched his knife

through the belly to pull out viscera, fresh

and hot, the dark blood pumping into his pail

as the other goat backed up against the far wall, screaming—

Would you have chosen to stop?

Or would you have continued, knowing

you wanted the blood because of the horn: symbol

both of plenty and of suffering, because it was a goat

who nursed the god who snapped this horn off

once in play? And blessed it later to be

forgiven. That the horn recalled the grain

of the once-fertile nation your country has invaded:

a country from which your government says

it can’t withdraw, its fields and infrastructure

depleted by years of drought and war.

The goat is ancient, milky-eyed. She’s half-blind,

though she can smell what’s happened

to her companion: the whole barn is thick with the death

that will now be hers. Would you keep on going?

Does the first animal’s suffering only make sense

if you complete your art, finish the sculpture in a way

the war will never be finished, the great horn

clotted with blood and displayed

in the foyer of the museum that commissioned it?

The show will be titled after a line from The Iliad:

Freighted with Dark Pains, a description of the arrow

shot by one soldier into the heart of another.

The curators chose the title for the beauty

of that line, perhaps for its suggestion

that the body giving and the body receiving pain

were equally blameless: only the arrow

delivers sorrow, only the arrow aches

as it rips through skin and muscle into the tender

flank of the animal you are even now

stroking in your arms. How can you not

hush and cluck at her, soothing this goat

the way you’d soothe the fears of anyone

you loved, bending down to gather her body

tightly against your own,

because the animal is old, already dying,

because you’re tired of watching

such frantic suffering, and because

it is not your knife carrying the pain.

Astyanax

Astyanax

They laughed, at first, at his shrieks

seeing the face his father wore: a horse-head

mask unearthed from the closet

where he kept his army uniform, the white

rubber face with real hair for a mane

under which his father’s shoulders bulged.

His father’s broad hands tossed the boy

onto his back, and he clung to him, this child

who’d never before seen an animal

like his father, though they’d read him stories

of ponies and gentle cart horses, bulls

in a field eating flowers, once a bugling buck

with its brace of horns.

Nothing like this. The teacup nostrils

flamed with blood, the pink lips cracked back

into a sneer. It filled the air

with muffled cries, the long mane dark

as his mother’s hair, and just as fine, as if