The poem begins with a killed bison and then keeps correcting itself, as if the speaker is looking more closely with each line. At first the animal seems to put on a new body "made entirely of hands." Then the poem pulls us closer: not under the earth but *in* it, in the small intestines. Then closer again: not flesh but hide, a kind of disguise. Finally the hands become glowing coals, each with five flames, a fire burning from behind the navel.
The images blur the bison's body with a human one. The hands, the intestines and the navel suggest that the animal's death passes into the person who eats it or who imagines it. The speaker doesn't state a feeling outright. The tone is hushed and awed, close to ritual. The mood moves from loss to transformation, and the short last line, "It begins to dance," feels like a release. Something dead is alive again, glowing and moving, and the poem leaves it there without explanation.