The Beast of Gévaudan
It was the mid-1700s in south-central France. Something was killing their children.
It sprang out from tree-lines & stole them into shade.
It made busts of their heads, bodies tender marble toppled in red leaves. No one knows where
it came from but whom
it spared is gone.
It broke into sunlight & shared
it with a woman at the river, who’d daggered a stick & stuck
it in the something’s chest &
it clattered breathless to the stony bank, the thing.
Its body was hearsay when the village came to see.
It followed, maybe, the river. No one followed the river. That winter
it deblooded eleven beloveds & a vagrant. No one said
it would be OK. Mouth to mouth,
it changed. The woman said
its eyes glowed red, that
it personed on hind legs. The man who fluted
its brain thought
it God’s reckoning. I want to say Grendel. Lay down your arms. Centuries have left
it & all
it was is a wolf & morally exempt. Good, bad, color
it how you want, you label
it your heart. They cut
it open like in fables. In
its stomach, a little girl.
It was an ending. There are only animal reasons why
it chose her, cholera’d wasted her brother, she was dismembered & the others weren’t in
it. No one knows quite how Heaven works either, but
it’s not the stomach of a wolf &
it’s fair then, I think, to say she was in Hell. She was becoming, as everyone comes to be, the sh
it of something else. But
it all moves in the same direction.
It coils & builds.
It never gets lost.
Tim Lynch’s poems appear in The Collagist, Puerto Del Sol, bedfellows, and elsewhere. He conducts interviews for Tell Tell Poetry and earned his MFA at Rutgers-Camden. Say hi @timlynchthatsit.