163 Animal poems

Come into animal presence. No man is so guileless as the serpent. The lonely white rabbit on the roof is a star twitching its ears at the rain. The llama intricately folding its hind legs to be seated not disdains but mildly disregards human approval. What joy when the insouciant armadillo glances at us and doesn't quicken his trotting across the track into the palm brush. What is this joy? That no animal falters, but knows what it must do? That the snake has no blemish, that the rabbit inspects his strange surroundings in white star-silence? The llama rests in dignity, the armadillo has some intention to pursue in the palm-forest. Those who were sacred have remained so, holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence of bronze, only the sight that saw it faltered and turned from it. An old joy returns in holy presence.

You never wrote the small green book like the poems of Edward Thomas. It was a book I dreamed. But watching the green report of your heart on the monitor it came to me as I stood like one of the doctors in my cap and gown, home, where you've lived like a bachelor at the far end of the house, there is a green diary: the book of the deer, the bear and the elk, with snapshots of Julian and Bob and Harry, old hunting friends dead as the game strung up on poles or drooped across fenders. I think you are the only one left. And still you fight to stay, breathing the scorched air of the burn ward, the sweet stink of your own charred flesh. Stepfather, don't go. Seventy-three years is not the end of the book, the letters you never wrote, because even before you blistered your hands the act of writing pained you. It took four shots to bring it down. Your father never praised you. Rising from dinner that night he beckoned toward the woodshed where the skinned deer hung draped in burlap. Then he whipped you with a belt. "Don't ever bring home meat shot up like that! One bullet is enough." I saw you kill a running buck at three hundred yards with one shot. It's a brutal art that fathers pass to sons. When the propane tank ignited you took the flaming cylinder in your arms like a lover and fought it out the door. Now you dream each night of the trailer burning. My mother screams and beats the fire out of her hair. She was not burned like you— twice, and three times, for your care. Now the deer are safe from us, I have one photograph to add to our book: a doe running through a field. My best shot. Somewhere in the grass behind her a fawn is hiding. You can't see it, but it's there waiting for its mother to draw us away. Later, she'll return and the two of them will be saved. Stepfather, Father, be like the fawn.

For Anthony Lawrence A large gray jumped, what I can only imagine is a dingo fence last night and made it at least 5 feet off the ground, under a full moon a million miles away, granite rocks and pine trees sealing a Cormac McCarthy evening. Wire song on cold wind musing low, tension wang and resonance, the land and ghosts play along and now and then a sheep bleets , but it hardly makes a bar onto these wire songs ... Small spinifex spin down from a spirit circle; the writers cottage ... (A pact made above the cottage by local artisans … winds rest for the time being ... ) No ghosting to report on this tour but aplenty haunting of words, sentences prematurely entertained that have the capacity to poltergeist and a writer’s biting off; too much in a spell! To only want that wire song later to floss with, when civilized nights of too much consumer discount become morose, head aching to be left alone and 
everyone thinks you need to be alone when you only want to sing aloud and be heard in the ides of a full moon over pine trees and granite boulders, simple, wire song ...

You take a kitchen-mallet and a knife and hit the right spot, so it doesn’t jerk, for jerking means only complications and reduces profit. And the watchers already narrow their eyes, already admire the dexterity, already reach for their purses. And paper is ready for wrapping it up. And smoke rises from chimneys. And Christmas peers from windows, creeps along the ground and splashes in barrels. Such is the law of happiness. I am just wondering if the carp is the right creature. A far better creature surely would be one which—stretched out—held flat—pinned down— would turn its blue eye on the mallet, the knife, the purse, the paper, the watchers and the chimneys and Christmas, And quickly say something. For instance These are my happiest days; these are my golden days. Or The starry sky above me and the moral law within me, Or And yet it moves. Or at least Hallelujah!

Small wonder he’s not been sighted all winter; this old brock’s been to Normandy and back through the tunnels and trenches of his subconscious. His father fell victim to mustard-gas at the Somme; one of his sons lost a paw to a gin-trap at Lisbellaw: another drills on the Antrim hills’ still-molten lava in a moth-eaten Balaclava. An elaborate system of foxholes and duckboards leads to the terminal moraine of an ex-linen baron’s croquet-lawn where he’s part-time groundsman. I would find it somewhat infra dig to dismiss him simply as a pig or heed Gerald of Wales’ tall tales of badgers keeping badger-slaves. For when he shuffles across the esker I glimpse my grandfather’s whiskers stained with tobacco-pollen. When he piddles against a bullaun I know he carries bovine TB but what I see is my father in his Sunday suit’s bespoke lime and lignite, patrolling his now-diminished estate and taking stock of this and that.

The buffaloes are gone. And those who saw the buffaloes are gone. Those who saw the buffaloes by thousands and how they pawed the prairie sod into dust with their hoofs, their great heads down pawing on in a great pageant of dusk, Those who saw the buffaloes are gone. And the buffaloes are gone.

You better not fool with a Bumblebee!— Ef you don't think they can sting—you'll see! They're lazy to look at, an' kind o' go Buzzin' an' bummin' aroun' so slow, An' ac' so slouchy an' all fagged out, Danglin' their legs as they drone about The hollyhawks 'at they can't climb in 'Ithout ist a-tumble-un out ag'in! Wunst I watched one climb clean 'way In a jimson-blossom, I did, one day,— An' I ist grabbed it — an' nen let go— An' " Ooh-ooh! Honey! I told ye so! " Says The Raggedy Man; an' he ist run An' pullt out the stinger, an' don't laugh none, An' says: "They has be'n folks, I guess, 'At thought I wuz predjudust, more er less,— Yit I still muntain 'at a Bumblebee Wears out his welcome too quick fer me!"

A husband puts an afghan over the dead goat’s torso, combs the knots out of  her beard. The goat smells chalk, wonders when the riders will come in their wool pakols red from walnuts, spurs chirring like castanets. The buzkashi whips will grow damp in their mouths, their rope belts slowly twisting in place. She knows not to be devoured is a perfect sentiment because she has thoughts to gather, faces to grow, hunger this morning and no throat, only the song in her teeth that goes on indefinitely as he saws off each hoof, just above the ankle, her knees bent for praying. Her head is axed. Her collar falls to the ground, its circle unbroken. She looks to see how deep is the pool of  blood is a river of  no one becoming her. With salt in her heart she’ll stay good for days. He’s been to her like her father he killed. He’s been to her like the father he killed. He turns her face to the window: mountains oddly still in the milk broth of oblivion. Intercourse: the sun drove a man in the ground like a stake.

I called the white donkey that hurt my left shoulder the last time it appeared, ramming me with its ivory head, cracking my back to relieve me of worry and hope. I called the white donkey, surprised at the sound of my voice. Scared, I wondered if the white head would give me its donkey brain, snowy matter dripping into my ears like the horse of the first man who fell off, the donkey teaching me about desire and the moan, that white hair on the back of my head that warns me. I called the donkey. It came slowly toward me, huge ears shaking with fury, its breath turning the air white as it bit into the white apple of my throat. I faced the donkey, watched its gait become a shuffle of possession, shaking its head as it stopped to root its dirty hoofs in the ground. I stepped back and clicked my fingers, but it would not come closer, its snort commanding I listen as it farted. I walked away and did not know it was I who yearned for labor of the ass because the animal I summoned couldn’t remove the white scar from my heart, a blind life I lived for good.

The barnacle is rather odd — It’s not related to the clam Or limpet. It’s an arthropod, Though one that doesn’t give a damn. Cousin to the crab and shrimp, When larval, it can twitch and swim, And make decisions — tiny imp That flits according to its whim. Once grown, with nothing more to prove It hunkers down, and will remain Stuck fast. And once it does not move, Has no more purpose for a brain. Its one boast is, it will not budge, Cemented where it chanced to sink, Sclerotic, stubborn as a grudge. Settled, it does not need to think.