163 Animal poems

I prefer warm fur, a perfect fire to lie beside, a cozy lap where I can nap, an empty chair when she's not there. I want heat on my feet on my nose on my hide. No cat I remember dislikes December inside.

A figment, a thumbed maquette of a cat, some ditched plaything, something brought in from outside: his white fur stiff and grey, coming apart at the seams. I study the muzzle of perished rubber, one ear eaten away, his sour body lumped like a bean-bag leaking thinly into a grim towel. I sit and watch the light degrade in his eyes. He tries and fails to climb to his chair, shirks in one corner of the kitchen, cowed, denatured, ceasing to be anything like a cat, and there's a new look in those eyes that refuse to meet mine and it's the shame of  being found out.  Just that. And with that loss of face his face, I see, has turned human.

Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness. My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts. Let us walk in the woods, says the cat. I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents, to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt. Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat. You feed me, I try to feed you, we are friends, says the cat, although I am more equal than you. Can you leap twenty times the height of your body? Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs? Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch. My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard. My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings walking round and round your bed and into your face. Come I will teach you to dance as naturally as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long. I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers. Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.

First we tamp down the ridges that criss-cross the yard then wait for the ground to move again. I hold the shoe box, you, the trowel. When I give you the signal you dig in behind and flip forward. Out he pops into daylight, blind velvet. We nudge him into the box, carry him down the hill. Four times we’ve done it. The children worry. Have we let them all go at the very same spot? Will they find each other? We can’t be sure ourselves, only just beginning to learn the fragile rules of uprooting.

After Ian Sanborn’s ASL poem of the same title A man with eyes as blank as the indifference of nature is staring straight ahead as the whole thing unfolds. He has a black beard, black shirt, black woolen cap — he could be a thief — you better keep your eyes on his hands which have begun clearing a clearing. Here he plants a seed as small as his own fingernail, and shazam! it sprouts roots, shoots, stems, branches — a whole tree shouldering up, tossing and swaying in the air between the sun’s magic hands and the man’s indifferent eyes. Next thing you know, an orphan index finger is worming its way across the stage that wasn’t a stage until your eyeing it made it so. It inches over to the tree like a lost knuckle finding its way home, its feelers testing, feeling, sniffing, finding purchase, finding a toe-hold, the tiny, spiny, hairy, leg-like appendages beginning to wiggle, to climb, to shinny up the tree, the elbow, the sheer escarpment, pausing to send out a line, a lasso, a long rope as fine as the filament of a spider launched from its abdomen and hooking the thumb of the lowest branch. A rope for rappelling, for jumping off this cliff, taking this dive, twisting as it untwists, enfolding as it unfolds, holding on for dear life as it spins itself into silk, those indifferent eyes almost imperceptibly squinting in sympathy with this closing up, this cloaking, this cloistering, this hanging upside down with a pulse inside. A fluttering pulse. A pulse like the flutter of eyelids. Like the flutter of wings. A heartbeat growing stronger, stronger, breaking out, breaking free, the wings opening, the eyes opening as if all this time they were closed — the blank eyes opening to the wings, taking them in, incredulous, in love with them — and the black and white has grown iridescent; the orphaned knuckle has found the hands; the hands have found their wings, and we are all utterly blown away. Ian Sanborn's ASL poem may be viewed here .

It nuzzles oblivion, confuses itself with mud. A creature of familiar taste, it ambushes from its nest of ooze the pond's brighter fish, clears its palate with their eggs, lumbers fat and stagnant into winter, lulled into dreams of light sinking until light drowns, and all is as before.

Rain will fall again on your smooth pavement, a light rain like a breath or a step. The breeze and the dawn will flourish again when you return, as if beneath your step. Between flowers and sills the cats will know. There will be other days, there will be other voices. You will smile alone. The cats will know. You will hear words old and spent and useless like costumes left over from yesterday’s parties. You too will make gestures. You’ll answer with words— face of springtime, you too will make gestures. The cats will know, face of springtime; and the light rain and the hyacinth dawn that wrench the heart of him who hopes no more for you— they are the sad smile you smile by yourself. There will be other days, other voices and renewals. Face of springtime, we will suffer at daybreak.

With measured pace, they move in single file, dark hides, white faces, plodding through low grass, then walk into the water, cattle-style, indifferent to the matter where they pass. The stream is high, the current swift—good rain, late snow-melt, cold. Immerging to the flank, the beasts proceed, a queue, a bovine chain, impassive, stepping to the farther bank— continuing their march, as if by word, down valley to fresh pasture. The elect, and stragglers, join, and recompose the herd, both multiple and single, to perfect impressions of an animated scene, the creek’s meanders, milling cows, and sun. Well cooled, the cattle graze knee-deep in green. We leave them to their feed, this painting done.

Beyond the field of grazing, gazing cows the great bull has a pasture to himself, monumental, black flanks barely twitching from the swarming flies. Only a few strands of wire separate us—how could I forget my childhood terror, the grownups warning that the old bull near my uncle’s farm would love to chase me, stomp me, gore me if I ever got too close. And so I skirted acres just to keep my distance, peeking through the leaves to see if he still was watching me, waiting for some foolish move— those fierce red eyes, the thunder in the ground— or maybe that was simply nightmares. It’s getting hard to tell, as years themselves keep gaining ground relentlessly, their hot breath on my back, and not a fence in sight.

Under the locked grille, the animals are crying. You hear them while you wait and when the bus pulls up, Finally, and you get on. That was many years ago. The cellar is given over to new shopkeepers, one after the other, Who fail and are replaced. Even the selfish brother, The crazed neighbor, the criminal in his cell, face of blue Tattoos, has never allowed a living thing to starve As you have. Who knows this except for you and the laughing African with his flashing gold teeth and padlock key.