163 Animal poems

The baboon is eating strawberries expired on the shelf of the Ft. Bragg Safeway. A coastal landscape with waves like inexpertly torn tinfoil hangs above his left shoulder at the check-in desk of an abandoned motel. The ocean itself is only a sound through a torn window screen where some hardscrabble bush about to flower is just a smell. Will something appropriately random please happen to convince me reality is still playing with a full deck?

And Smart saw God concentric in his cat. Smart’s cat, artificing faith from cyclone volition. There is no God in you, yellow dog. Your breath is our daily quicksand; you juggle your legs into an avid heap. You are bent on death. There is no God in you. You are imperfect and critterly. I will consider you, for all of that. Today, as you joust farewell to the park; the pack in their garrison palsy, tails agog, and you, cocking your head to cup Madam’s strewn bark, your nose like an antique brooch in the sun. I will consider you, yellow dog, as you twist in a rapt mechanical dream. I will consider your coat, the color of fenced gold; how you are your own secular halo. I will consider your skull, the narrow skull of a young gazelle whose victory is leaping. And I will consider your eyes, their hazel light a gulp of fire, those firewater eyes, holding now a numb depth down, and milkier flickering monthly. I will consider your youth, when we didn’t know if you would saunter or quake; when we didn’t know if you would prove savvy or giddy or both. It was both. Our frank amaze at your hardy smarts! Our silly delight at each degree of more-than-human knowing. I will consider you, yellow dog, your pale moods and your gazing; your fidgets and your snoozes. There is no God in you, the deep-time of a dog year is enough. And lately you are wiser than all zero. Dear dog, creaking like a haunted house, I will consider you, from bucking young ’un to patient as settling porter; how you held the pack when Fat Man was small and a zoomy nuisance of wriggling. I will consider your narrow self, aslant against my chest in grief, in grieving, overwhelmed, when you were the busy broom that swept the pieces of me together. Yes, I will consider the yellow dog, his bestowing snout in the chill a.m.; his royal cheek and his dances. A yellow dog comes only once and is hisself: brilliant, final, and entire.

Consider the toucan’s festive gold breast. Its multicolored pecker, oddly cutesy & perhaps, a cartoon-comfort to the gym-roped Westerners reclining on a beach in Costa Rica. It’s the same old song: good-natured smile, hard work, a hat’s off kind of attitude & before you can say post-racial, you’re a Resort Toucan. The benefits are room & board but the cost is blood. Most times it’s the closest ones—birds of the same rainforest, same quadrant, same tree—who give up your whereabouts to the jaguar. Quick as you got the gig, the boss is tossing you out on your ass all over some flipped umbrellas & a tourist’s scarfed thumb. So now you’re roofless, alone, vulnerable & the beast is licking his chops in your mirrored aviators. Stifling too is the Midwestern Subdivision in its treatment of the black squirrel. Science tells us black squirrels have driven out native grey squirrels in numerous areas, but no bullshit in my development, black squirrels are relegated to lots with a view of the highway. Mornings they work shade for acorns between homes narrow as Lincoln Logs. History tells us black squirrels can’t afford robust landscaping but will pay their mortgage— chair the neighborhood watch if you like. Slenderizing, their night of hair. They’re sun’s prey. They avoid overexposure, make tanning trend. Black squirrels they fit in, get along. Know no one. They see other black squirrels & run.

One by one, like guests at a late party They shake our hands and step into the dark: Arabian ostrich; Long-eared kit fox; Mysterious starling. One by one, like sheep counted to close our eyes, They leap the fence and disappear into the woods: Atlas bear; Passenger pigeon; North Island laughing owl; Great auk; Dodo; Eastern wapiti; Badlands bighorn sheep.

Looking at the lion behind the plate glass I wasn’t sure what I was looking at: a lion, OK, but he seemed to come apart, not literally I mean, but I couldn’t see him whole: Mane. Teeth. The slung belly pumping as he panted and began to roar. His balls sheathed in fur swaying a little. His tail’s tuft jerking in an arc like an old-time pump handle rusted in midair. Somebody or something I read once said that when Jesus had his vision of what his father, God, would do to him, that Jesus could only see pieces of a cross, pieces of a body appearing through flashes of sun, as if the body in his vision was hands looking for feet, a head for a torso, everything come unmagnetized from the soul: the lion caught me in his stare not at or through me but fixated on the great chain of being that Jesus couldn’t see and that a zebra might gallop in — black and white stripes marking longitudes of this world turning to meat, bloody meat — this vision of an inmate that Jesus’s father helped to orchestrate by making a cageless cage with glass instead of bars — though the lion didn’t seem to care, he was roaring for his keepers to bring him food, so everything’s what it should be if you’re a lion. Nor did the sea lion seem concerned about having gone a little crazy, barking incessantly so I could see the plush, hot pink insides of its throat, though like the lion through the glass there’s this distortion, my reflection I’m looking through that makes me float above the zoo: and now this silence at closing time pours like a waterfall in different zones of silences that, pouring through my head, surround roaring, barking, human muttering — is any of that what being sounds like? Or is it just animal gasping like what Jesus must have heard from the thieves hanging beside him, one damned, one saved? What was in his heart when his vision clarified and he saw it was a hand he recognized that the nail was driving through?

Once you saw a drove of young pigs crossing the highway. One of them pulling his body by the front feet, the hind legs dragging flat. Without thinking, you called the Humane Society. They came with a net and went for him. They were matter of fact, uniformed; there were two of them, their truck ominous, with a cage. He was hiding in the weeds. It was then you saw his eyes. He understood. He was trembling. After they took him, you began to suffer regret. Years later, you remember his misfit body scrambling to reach the others. Even at this moment, your heart is going too fast; your hands sweat.

This was gruesome—fighting over a ham sandwich with one of the tiny cats of Rome, he leaped on my arm and half hung on to the food and half hung on my shirt and coat. I tore it apart and let him have his portion, I think I lifted him down, sandwich and all, on the sidewalk and sat with my own sandwich beside him, maybe I petted his bony head and felt him shiver. I have told this story over and over; some things root in the mind; his boldness, of course, was frightening and unexpected—his stubbornness—though hunger drove him mad. It was the breaking of boundaries, the sudden invasion, but not only that, it was the sharing of food and the sharing of space; he didn’t run into an alley or into a cellar, he sat beside me, eating, and I didn’t run into a trattoria, say, shaking, with food on my lips and blood on my cheek, sobbing; but not only that, I had gone there to eat and wait for someone. I had maybe an hour before she would come and I was full of hope and excitement. I have resisted for years interpreting this, but now I think I was given a clue, or I was giving myself a clue, across the street from the glass sandwich shop. That was my last night with her, the next day I would leave on the train for Paris and she would meet her husband. Thirty-five years ago I ate my sandwich and moaned in her arms, we were dying together; we never met again although she was pregnant when I left her—I have a daughter or son somewhere, darling grandchildren in Norwich, Connecticut, or Canton, Ohio. Every five years I think about her again and plan on looking her up. The last time I was sitting in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and heard that her husband was teaching at Princeton, if she was still married, or still alive, and tried calling. I went that far. We lived in Florence and Rome. We rowed in the bay of Naples and floated, naked, on the boards. I started to think of her again today. I still am horrified by that cat’s hunger. I still am puzzled by the connection. This is another insane devotion, there must be hundreds, although it isn’t just that, there is no pain, and the thought is fleeting and sweet. I think it’s my own dumb boyhood, walking around with Slavic cheeks and burning stupid eyes. I think I gave the cat half of my sandwich to buy my life, I think I broke it in half as a decent sacrifice. It was this I bought, the red coleus, the split rocking chair, the silk lampshade. Happiness. I watched him with pleasure. I bought memory. I could have lost it. How crazy it sounds. His face twisted with cunning. The wind blowing through his hair. His jaws working.

This was gruesome—fighting over a ham sandwich with one of the tiny cats of Rome, he leaped on my arm and half hung on to the food and half hung on to my shirt and coat. I tore it apart and let him have his portion, I think I lifted him down, sandwich and all, on the sidewalk and sat with my own sandwich beside him, maybe I petted his bony head and felt him shiver. I have told this story over and over; some things root in the mind; his boldness, of course, was frightening and unexpected—his stubbornness—though hunger drove him mad. It was the breaking of boundaries, the sudden invasion, but not only that it was the sharing of food and the sharing of space; he didn't run into an alley or into a cellar, he sat beside me, eating, and I didn't run into a trattoria, say, shaking, with food on my lips and blood on my cheek, sobbing; but not only that, I had gone there to eat and wait for someone. I had maybe an hour before she would come and I was full of hope and excitement. I have resisted for years interpreting this, but now I think I was given a clue, or I was giving myself a clue, across the street from the glass sandwich shop. That was my last night with her, the next day I would leave on the train for Paris and she would meet her husband. Thirty-five years ago I ate my sandwich and moaned in her arms, we were dying together; we never met again although she was pregnant when I left her—I have a daughter or son somewhere, darling grandchildren in Norwich, Connecticut, or Canton, Ohio. Every five years I think about her again and plan on looking her up. The last time I was sitting in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and heard that her husband was teaching at Princeton, if she was still married, or still alive, and tried calling. I went that far. We lived in Florence and Rome. We rowed in the bay of Naples and floated, naked, on the boards. I started to think of her again today. I still am horrified by the cat's hunger. I still am puzzled by the connection. This is another insane devotion, there must be hundreds, although it isn't just that, there is no pain, and the thought is fleeting and sweet. I think it's my own dumb boyhood, walking around with Slavic cheeks and burning stupid eyes. I think I gave the cat half of my sandwich to buy my life, I think I broke it in half as a decent sacrifice. It was this I bought, the red coleus, the split rocking chair, the silk lampshade. Happiness. I watched him with pleasure. I bought memory. I could have lost it. How crazy it sounds. His face twisted with cunning. The wind blowing through his hair. His jaw working.

After Robert Hooke All afternoon a reddish trickle out of the roots of the beech and across the lawn, a sort of  rust that shines and dances. Close up, it proves to be ant, each droplet a horned traveler finicking its way round the crooked geometry of a grass forest. A finger felled in their path rocks them, amazed, back on their haunches. I see them tasting the air for subtle intelligence, till one ventures to scale it, and others follow. They are fidgety subjects to draw. If you sink the feet in glue the rest twists and writhes; kill one, the juices evaporate in seconds, leaving only the shriveled casing. I dunked one in brandy. It struggled till the air rose from its mouth in pinprick bubbles. I let it soak an hour, then dried it, observed the spherical head, the hairlike feelers, the grinning vice of its sideways jaw, the coppery armor plate with its scattered spines. Some draft stirred it then. It rose to all its feet, and set off across the rough miles of desk.

Two wandering across the porcelain Siberia, one alone on the window sill, four across the ceiling's senseless field of pale yellow, one negotiating folds in a towel: tiny, bronze-colored, antennae 'strongly elbowed,' crawling over Antony and Cleopatra , face down, unsurprised, one dead in the mountainous bar of soap. Sub-family Formicinae (a single segment behind the thorax), the sickle moons of their abdomens, one trapped in bubbles (I soak in the tub); with no clear purpose they come in by the baseboard, do not bite, crush bloodless beneath a finger. Peterson's calls them 'social creatures,' yet what grim society: identical pilgrims, seed-like, brittle, pausing on the path only three seconds to touch another's face, some hoisting the papery carcasses of their dead in their jaws, which open and close like the clasp of a necklace. 'Mating occurs in flight'— what better way? Weightless, reckless rapture: the winged queen and her mate, quantum passion spiraling near the kumquat, and then the queen sheds her wings, plants the pearl-like larvae in their cribs of sand: more anvil-headed, creeping attentions to follow cracks in the tile, the lip of the tub, and one starting across the mirror now, doubled.