All     the mules    have      walked away.

At least their bodies were mules.

Walking others’ stuff up difficult passageways was
                                    what these bodies were.
No matter how deep you look    you don’t find matter raw.
                                                           The mules’ joints
if ugly—still they were fit to trudge. Trudging
mud. Mules. In midnight mountains.

If words say it—you can’t judge
just because of that. Mud is shining mud is
red. It cakes, takes shape, breaks, baked into
bricks. If you build something out of a thing, don’t curse it.
The sounds have revenge on a mind that superimposes
its own structures      over those the raw sounds have.

Nothing is just an animal, just mud.
The horrible smell of the newly dead,
the huge vitality of larvae swarming in the corpus—
“the dead elk
is full of night life.”

All     the mules have walked away.
They know what you think.