There's been a llama sighted by Darby Mitchell

--at dusk,
on End of Summer Road.
He wears red earmuffs, and he's in possession of his eye-teeth –
that's the problem.

The llama escaped by,
first,
corralling horses into one ever-diminishing angle from which they could retreat
no farther,
and when the creature saw he had the horses cowered,
he arked over the barbed wire and was gone –
a male loose, homeless, panicked,
and the sun in the sky a dry yellow chrysanthemum,
about to drop its petals, one by one.

His nuts are gone.

See, if you're going to take the nuts from a llama,
you've got to take the eye-teeth, too,
because you have not blinded him enough
by taking only his nuts.

The eye-teeth must come out.
He still can see – cockeyed, yes, but he bares his eye-teeth, cocks his head,
squints sideways, and with what's left
he can still see the honey of the autumn sun,
spilling its treasure,
dropping gold by golden flake on End of Summer Road.

Surely he will not berserker all the way to winter?

Perhaps all is not yet lost.

The problem is to catch him –
either on this side of summer,
before the golden light is gone,
or on the other,
where he will emerge
asleep
in the cool blue shade of dawn.

BIO: Darby Mitchell is an English professor, semi-retired from Bay de Noc Community College, Escanaba, Michigan, where she has taught literature and writing for many years. Darby has been writing creatively since she was about 13. She has formed her own publishing company, Castle Publishing, has won university writing prizes, is a Shakespeare-Marlowe scholar, and has been published in many current ezines. Darby can be contacted direct at mitcheda@baycollege.edu