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Is it a bull with two horns rising, or a cow without horns bowing her head to the moon?

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Earth is a convex circle, the moon a concave circle: inverted brackets, and between them—the bull.

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White sky
The moon – ancient golden coin
Hoof tracks
left by cattle along the path

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The ibex watches the moon; the moon, aged Bedouin scout, examines the tracks.

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An ibex comes across desert ascents. He knows he cannot ascend. But his body contains the ascents.

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An ibex slowly approaches a treasure pit.

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Climbing totem pole.

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Desert water trough.
Hoof prints to and from.

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Close to the earth
our horns tonight
ram the air

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Walking the open space
Occasionally we lift our head to the sky and bellow

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“The golden calf.” But he roams free, drinks water, laps up moonlight. They do not dance around him for he is mostly unseen. Sometimes he reveals himself and then they see.

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The passion to return to caves, to be near stone, to paste blood on walls, to paint and hunt the beast, to freeze, to warm oneself at the fire, to grip a hand-axe, and at the very least—to be a Byzantine icon-painter, sitting on the outskirts of Constantinople, in a monk’s chamber, contemplating the open plains and the volcanoes of Cappadocia, bread and water like hill and sea, flattening gold leaf by candlelight.

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It truly takes the entire globe to make one ibex possible. But it takes all the infinite empty space to hold the globe.

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There are hoofs because there is earth.

Dror Burstein
May 2012

Translation: Jessica Cohen