163 Animal poems

The one horse you gave me you took back when she went insane, when she began to chew wood instead of the expensive grain we bought from the feed store, the grain that had the sweet smell of molasses and was good for even us to chew. She turned into an ugly thing with her wild thoughts, and I forgot about the beauty expected of her when her blanket filled out and complemented her chestnut body and the name the Nez Percé gave her. She rotted and began to stink of promises gone wrong, of gods avenging their defilement. A man who knew what to do with useless horses came and took her away in a wooden trailer she tried to chew, and my tears welled up in huge drops before they splattered on the ground, as I trembled and realized I would have to give up her own ghost for her, ghost which she did not have, ghost which she came here beautifully without.

The tortoise walks on tiptoe in June, the month of his ardors. Buttery light, distant thunder in the month of my ardors.

for Robert Lowell This is the time of year when almost every night the frail, illegal fire balloons appear. Climbing the mountain height, rising toward a saint still honored in these parts, the paper chambers flush and fill with light that comes and goes, like hearts. Once up against the sky it's hard to tell them from the stars— planets, that is—the tinted ones: Venus going down, or Mars, or the pale green one. With a wind, they flare and falter, wobble and toss; but if it's still they steer between the kite sticks of the Southern Cross, receding, dwindling, solemnly and steadily forsaking us, or, in the downdraft from a peak, suddenly turning dangerous. Last night another big one fell. It splattered like an egg of fire against the cliff behind the house. The flame ran down. We saw the pair of owls who nest there flying up and up, their whirling black-and-white stained bright pink underneath, until they shrieked up out of sight. The ancient owls' nest must have burned. Hastily, all alone, a glistening armadillo left the scene, rose-flecked, head down, tail down, and then a baby rabbit jumped out, short-eared, to our surprise. So soft!—a handful of intangible ash with fixed, ignited eyes. Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry! O falling fire and piercing cry and panic, and a weak mailed fist clenched ignorant against the sky!

In the groves of Africa from their natural wonder the wildebeest, zebra, the okapi, the elephant, have enterd the marvelous. No greater marvelous know I than the mind’s natural jungle. The wives of the Congo distil there their red and the husbands hunt lion with spear and paint Death-spore on their shields, wear his teeth, claws and hair on ordinary occasions. There the Swahili open his doors, let loose thru the trees the tides of Death’s sound and distil from their leaves the terrible red. He is the consort of dreams I have seen, heard in the orchestral dark like the barking of dogs. Death is the dog-headed man zebra striped and surrounded by silence who walks like a lion, who is black. It was his voice crying come back, that Virginia Woolf heard, turnd her fine skull, hounded and haunted, stopt, pointed into the scent where I see her in willows, in fog, at the river of sound in the trees. I see her prepare there to enter Death’s mountains like a white Afghan hound pass into the forest, closed after, let loose in the leaves with more grace than a hound and more wonder there even with flowers wound in her hair, allowing herself like Ophelia a last pastoral gesture of love toward the world. And I see all our tortures absolved in the fog, dispersed in Death’s forests, forgotten. I see all this gentleness like a hound in the water float upward and outward beyond my dark hand. I am waiting this winter for the more complete black-out, for the negro armies in the eucalyptus, for the cities laid open and the cold in the love-light, for hounds women and birds to go back to their forests and leave us our solitude. .   .   . Negroes, negroes, all those princes, holding cups of rhinoceros bone, make magic with my blood. Where beautiful Marijuana towers taller than the eucalyptus, turns within the lips of night and falls, falls downward, where as giant Kings we gathered and devourd her burning hands and feet, O Moonbar thee and Clarinet! those talismans that quickened in their sheltering leaves like thieves, those Negroes, all those princes holding to their mouths like Death the cups of rhino bone, were there to burn my hands and feet, divine the limit of the bone and with their magic tie and twist me like a rope. I know no other continent of Africa more dark than this dark continent of my breast. And when we are deserted there, when the rustling electric has passt thru the air, once more we begin in the blind and blood throat the African catches; and Desdemona, Desdemona like a demon wails within our bodies, warns against this towering Moor of self and then laments her passing from him. And I cry, Hear! Hear in the coild and secretive ear the drums that I hear beat. The Negroes, all those princes holding cups of bone and horn, are there in halls of blood that I call forests, in the dark and shining caverns where beats heart and pulses brain, in jungles of my body, there Othello moves, striped black and white, the dog-faced fear. Moves I, I, I, whom I have seen as black as Orpheus, pursued deliriously his sound and drownd in hunger’s tone, the deepest wilderness. Then it was I, Death singing, who bewildered the forest. I thot him my lover like a hound of great purity disturbing the shadow and flesh of the jungle. This was the beginning of the ending year. From all of the empty the tortured appear, and the bird-faced children crawl out of their fathers and into that never filld pocket, the no longer asking but silent, seeing nowhere the final sleep. The halls of Africa we seek in dreams as barriers of dream against the deep, and seas disturbd turn back upon their tides into the rooms deserted at the roots of love. There is no end. And how sad then is even the Congo. How the tired sirens come up from the water, not to be toucht but to lie on the rocks of the thunder. How sad then is even the marvelous!

Because I have come to the fence at night, the horses arrive also from their ancient stable. They let me stroke their long faces, and I note in the light of the now-merging moon how they, a Morgan and a Quarter, have been by shake-guttered raindrops spotted around their rumps and thus made Appaloosas, the ancestral horses of this place. Maybe because it is night, they are nervous, or maybe because they too sense what they have become, they seem to be waiting for me to say something to whatever ancient spirits might still abide here, that they might awaken from this strange dream, in which there are fences and stables and a man who doesn’t know a single word they understand.

Ah, silly Pug, wert thou so sore afraid? Mourn not, my Wat, nor be thou so dismayed. It passeth fickle Fortune’s power and skill To force my heart to think thee any ill. No Fortune base, thou sayest, shall alter thee? And may so blind a witch so conquer me? No, no, my Pug, though Fortune were not blind, Assure thyself she could not rule my mind. Fortune, I know, sometimes doth conquer kings, And rules and reigns on earth and earthly things, But never think Fortune can bear the sway If virtue watch, and will her not obey. Ne chose I thee by fickle Fortune’s rede, Ne she shall force me alter with such speed But if to try this mistress’ jest with thee. Pull up thy heart, suppress thy brackish tears, Torment thee not, but put away thy fears. Dead to all joys and living unto woe, Slain quite by her that ne’er gave wise men blow, Revive again and live without all dread, The less afraid, the better thou shalt speed.

A lot more of than thought, unsought, come out white. Lemurs of Madagascar, and leopards sans spots. Brilliant, I think, to spurn pigment and burn in December light, a December filament. No one would know if there’s snow in your hair, or whether or not, when they knock, you are there.

The sudden pink shape surfacing in black-water lagoons shocked explorers. All dolphins share man’s thumb and fingerbones, but these also wear his flesh. When the river overflows and floods the varzea, these dolphins travel miles to splash in the shallows amongst buttress-roots of giant rainforest trees. The waters abate, trapping fish, dolphins never. A lamp burning dolphin oil blinds. At night the pink-flesh contours melt and blur. The flipper extends the hidden hand to lift its woman’s torso to the land. An Eve, born each night from the black Amazon, roams the dark banks for victims to draw to the water and death. Taboo to the Indians, this pink daughter of the river’s magic always looks, to explorers, like she’s smiling.

In icy fields. Is water flowing in the tank? Will they huddle together, warm bodies pressing? (Is it the year of the goat or the sheep? Scholars debating Chinese zodiac, follower or leader.) O lead them to a warm corner, little ones toward bulkier bodies. Lead them to the brush, which cuts the icy wind. Another frigid night swooping down — Aren’t you worried about them? I ask my friend, who lives by herself on the ranch of goats, far from here near the town of Ozona. She shrugs, “Not really, they know what to do. They’re goats.”

The thing about a shark is—teeth, One row above, one row beneath. Now take a close look. Do you find It has another row behind? Still closer—here, I’ll hold your hat: Has it a third row behind that? Now look in and...Look out! Oh my, I’ll never know now! Well, goodbye.