Honor Also The Mountain Lion Poem by Tom Goff

Will the injured man forever see, feel, only
broken images, disjunct hindquarters, tensed neck, incisor-
studded mouth, as victims of certain head traumas perceive shapes?

(Exaggeration of ways we ourselves see; only the flash of a haunch
in the grass and gravel of Bannister Park…and yet─ the revealed beast,
back to a fence, skin taut upon skull, glaring force at us open-mouthed
in our car near Volcano.)

The California woman fought well, she who jabbed
at a mountain lion with a log four inches in diameter,
with a ballpoint pen snatched from the pocket
of her bleeding husband, aiming sharpness at the eyes,
blunt force at the muzzle, of the strange, implacable
tawny-skin. The lady blameless, as we humans

count fellow humans blameless; the loving pair were simply
walking in a park redwood-blessed; so does the judge
decide with clear impartiality, though it is his
class of citizens that profits by the opinion, the dictum.
Nothing nobler than that the woman should protect
her mate, even when the instinctual message thrilling
her legs was surely to run. Did the mountain lion

have a legal basis upon which to proceed? Did it petition, rail
of encroachment, of boundaries, rights, permissions to hunt?
There being no tribunal under the trees, the cougar
sprang from hiding, from behind a fat boulder, from
behind a stout pine or fir, charged with one noble truth

its blood, its artful teeth, its fifteen-foot-vertical-leap legs,
must respect, must come running for:
savagery ungovernable, need sprouting fangs and flashes
from deep yellow unfathomable eyes. It too had a mate
or a sibling. Honor also the mountain lion.