Bestiary for the End Times

Olm (Slovenia)
 
The woods are lovely, dark
and deep, and lost in them
 
somewhere, sometime
is a fleshy, brass-headed dragon
 
whose teeth are seeds and whose
weathers are the foul moods
 
of an empire in its death-throes.
 
Hey dragon-cito, may your
embryonic hatchlings be born
 
again one day in the amphora
of Slovenian caverns, in the jelly-
 
egged fungus of her wet music
in the impossible dark silvered filaments
 
that catch the light and hold it
deep underground. You, brass-headed
 
dragon, you know better than we
that nature has no prisons, only wombs.