Panthera onca

Jasleena Grewal

There is no freedom anymore for us who are fragments of mystery, there is no way out for returning to oneself, to the stone of oneself, no other stars remain except the sea.
     —Pablo Neruda

A jaguar, like a child, indicates the health of a system. It is a keystone. In this pulse place—its body estuarine, current with blood—a jaguar plays like a cat and yolks her hunts. Careful you meet her eyes lest your slumber require your body to marionette itself into surrender; they starve your god-self: false and clamoring. A newborn’s breath willed her coat as passage from twilight to black. It gleams like sharkskin and machetes as so—the sinew passing of spine machining forward, as if by toy train tracks. Her gait peaks and troughs in quiet forest steadily thrumming, earmarked with the lilt of birds.

Here, your self sloughs off.

Her body a morpheme of night, portaled like the Bermuda sky. Each hair is a semaphore to that beyond, a constellation story forming with each step. In compassion and theta wave, children read her legends. Perseus and Draco glimmer like a gossamer net on a face of her coat, forming at the sacroiliac crest.

Each point is a jewel. When little girls go to dream, stars guide themselves towards us in the deep-set dark; the jaguar trounces forward.