163 Animal poems

Because he swings so neatly through the trees, An ape feels natural in the word trapeze.

There is a two-headed goat, a four-winged chicken and a sad lamb with seven legs whose complicated little life was spent in Hopland, California. I saw the man with doubled eyes who seemed to watch in me my doubts about my spirit. Will it snag upon this aging flesh? There is a strawberry that grew out of a carrot plant, a blade of grass that lanced through a thick rock, a cornstalk nineteen-feet-two-inches tall grown by George Osborne of Silome, Arkansas. There is something grotesque growing in me I cannot tell. It has been waxing, burgeoning, for a long time. It weighs me down like the chains of the man of Lahore who began collecting links on his naked body until he crawled around the town carrying the last thirteen years of his life six-hundred-seventy pounds. Each link or each lump in me is an offense against love. I want my own lit candle lamp buried in my skull like the Lighthouse Man of Chungking, who could lead the travelers home. Well, I am still a traveler and I don’t know where I live. If my home is here, inside my breast, light it up! And I will invite you in as my first guest.

Ruminant pillows! Gregarious soft boulders! If one of you found a gap in a stone wall, the rest of you—rams, ewes, bucks, wethers, lambs; mothers and daughters, old grandfather-father, cousins and aunts, small bleating sons— followed onward, stupid as sheep, wherever your leader’s sheep-brain wandered to. My grandfather spent all day searching the valley and edges of Ragged Mountain, calling “Ke-day!” as if he brought you salt, “Ke-day! Ke-day!” *         *         * When the shirt wore out, and darns in the woolen shirt needed darning, a woman in a white collar cut the shirt into strips and braided it, as she braided her hair every morning. In a hundred years the knees of her great-granddaughter crawled on a rug made from the wool of sheep whose bones were mud, like the bones of the woman, who stares from an oval in the parlor. *         *         * I forked the brambly hay down to you in nineteen-fifty. I delved my hands deep in the winter grass of your hair. When the shearer cut to your nakedness in April and you dropped black eyes in shame, hiding in barnyard corners, unable to hide, I brought grain to raise your spirits, and ten thousand years wound us through pasture and hayfield together, threads of us woven together, three hundred generations from Africa’s hills to New Hampshire’s. *         *         * You were not shrewd like the pig. You were not strong like the horse. You were not brave like the rooster. Yet none of the others looked like a lump of granite that grew hair, and none of the others carried white fleece as soft as dandelion seed around a black face, and none of them sang such a flat and sociable song. *         *         * Now the black-faced sheep have wandered and will not return, even if I should search the valleys and call “Ke-day,” as if I brought them salt. Now the railroad draws a line of rust through the valley. Birch, pine, and maple lean from cellarholes and cover the dead pastures of Ragged Mountain except where machines make snow and cables pull money up hill, to slide back down. *         *         * At South Danbury Church twelve of us sit— cousins and aunts, sons— where the great-grandfathers of the forty-acre farms filled every pew. I look out the window at summer places, at Boston lawyers’ houses with swimming pools cunningly added to cowsheds, and we read an old poem aloud, about Israel’s sheep, old lumps of wool, and we read that the rich farmer, though he names his farm for himself, takes nothing into his grave; that even if people praise us, because we are successful, we will go under the ground to meet our ancestors collected there in the darkness; that we are all of us sheep, and death is our shepherd, and we die as the animals die.

Behind the Fauverie a crawl of quayside traffic while Aramis roars for his food, the air turbulent as he opens his jaws in a huge yawn. If I hold my breath, half-close my eyes and listen hard — there at the tongue’s root, in the voicebox of night, I might hear the almost-vanished. He’s summoning his prey, this lord of thunderbolts, calling to ghosts of the Lost World, with this evening chant to scarlet macaw, tapir, golden lion tamarin. Until everything goes slow and the rush-hour queue of scale-to-scale cars is one giant caiman basking on the bank. The jaguar’s all swimming stealth now — no sound — a stalker camouflaged by floating hyacinths, senses tuned only to the reptile of the road. Then, with one bound, spray scatters like glass, as Aramis lands on the brute’s back and bites its neck.

The blue booby lives on the bare rocks of Galápagos and fears nothing. It is a simple life: they live on fish, and there are few predators. Also, the males do not make fools of themselves chasing after the young ladies. Rather, they gather the blue objects of the world and construct from them a nest—an occasional Gaulois package, a string of beads, a piece of cloth from a sailor’s suit. This replaces the need for dazzling plumage; in fact, in the past fifty million years the male has grown considerably duller, nor can he sing well. The female, though, asks little of him— the blue satisfies her completely, has a magical effect on her. When she returns from her day of gossip and shopping, she sees he has found her a new shred of blue foil: for this she rewards him with her dark body, the stars turn slowly in the blue foil beside them like the eyes of a mild savior.

The plastic Great Horned Owl, stuck with glue on the stamped tin, corbelled cornice lip impresses no one — not the starlings that dip and stitch, nor pigeons as they fluff and coo around its feet. And vinyl siding’s too regular — each molded, faux-grained strip identical, but for dents, and that drip of   bird shit from a sill. What if all you might say speaks like crafted, ersatz things: mimicry in a tongue you barely know? Your owl signs death, the cornice stone, the fake clapboard conjures farmhouse. While just below the ledge, a wren’s mindless gestures make an altar of twigs, in veneration of wings.

How do you explain why elephants appear to move their unwieldy hulks with greater dignity than most humans do in their finest moments, as if they had evolved beyond wanting anything but what they have? Why does the field begin to ripple before the wind arrives in whispers, as if there were a communication, as if the landscape were poorly dubbed, and we weren’t expected to notice? What butterfly does not dart away from us as if it could sense our latent cruelties, and yet return to check and double-check? Has the night not gotten recently darker, as if to insinuate that we have squandered the light that was there? Have we made too much of our own? And did you notice afterward the dawn opening up with a tentative eagerness as if there were something crucial to illumine, as if we would wake up early just to see it? I imagine you reading this now with an expression of quiet trouble itself troubled by currents of hope, as if you imagined me here with you, as if I might be able to see your expression, and at least answer it with mine.

I’m in charge of a cage. I know those that won’t. I don’t mean can’t. Just won’t. There’s a roster for Tuesdays, Fridays. Dogs to die. The disconsolate, the abandoned, those with recurrent symptoms, the incorrigible mutt — oh, a dozen choices by way of reasons. Even so, some won’t. Won’t play along once their number’s up. The “rainbow bridge” in the offing as the posher clinics put it, a pig’s ear as a final treat, a venison chew, the profession behaving beautifully at a time like this. Still, those that won’t. Won’t go nicely, I mean, with a gaze to melt, a last slobbed lick. Those with a soul’s defiance, though embarrassment in the lunchroom should you come at that one! Even after the bag is zipped, you feel it: We’re real at the end as you are, buster. We sniff the wind. What say if we say it together?

What images could yet suggest their range of tender colours, thick as old brocade, or shot silk or flowers on a dress where black and rose and lime seem to caress the red that starts to shimmer as they fade? Like something half-remembered from a dream they come from places we have never seen. They chatter and they squawk and sometimes scream. Here the macaw clings at the rings to show the young galahs talking as they feed with feathers soft and pink as dawn on snow that it too has a dry and dusky tongue. Their murmuring embraces every need from languid vanity to wildest greed. In the far corner sit two smoky crones their heads together in a kind of love. One cleans the other’s feathers while it moans. The others seem to whisper behind fans while noble dandies gamble in a room asserting values everyone rejects. A lidded eye observes, and it reflects. The peacocks still pretend they own the yard. For all the softness, how the beaks are hard.

I need them true to life and so I shoot them, as many as fill the field at dawn, and then fix wires to prop them as if feeding their young or bending to the river. Why make a little book when they exist life-sized, can be etched to stand high as my hip? Often have I wished I had eight pairs of hands to hold them, and another body for the gun.