163 Animal poems

Making his advances He does not look at her, nor sniff at her, No, not even sniff at her, his nose is blank. Only he senses the vulnerable folds of skin That work beneath her while she sprawls along In her ungainly pace, Her folds of skin that work and row Beneath the earth-soiled hovel in which she moves. And so he strains beneath her housey walls And catches her trouser-legs in his beak Suddenly, or her skinny limb, And strange and grimly drags at her Like a dog, Only agelessly silent, with a reptile's awful persistency. Grim, gruesome gallantry, to which he is doomed. Dragged out of an eternity of silent isolation And doomed to partiality, partial being, Ache, and want of being, Want, Self-exposure, hard humiliation, need to add himself on to her. Born to walk alone, Forerunner, Now suddenly distracted into this mazy side-track, This awkward, harrowing pursuit, This grim necessity from within. Does she know As she moves eternally slowly away? Or is he driven against her with a bang, like a bird flying in the dark against a window, All knowledgeless? The awful concussion, And the still more awful need to persist, to follow, follow, continue, Driven, after æons of pristine, fore-god-like singleness and oneness, At the end of some mysterious, red-hot iron, Driven away from himself into her tracks, Forced to crash against her. Stiff, gallant, irascible, crook-legged reptile, Little gentleman, Sorry plight, We ought to look the other way. Save that, having come with you so far, We will go on to the end.

I thought he was dumb, I said he was dumb, Yet I've heard him cry. First faint scream, Out of life's unfathomable dawn, Far off, so far, like a madness, under the horizon's dawning rim, Far, far off, far scream. Tortoise in extremis . Why were we crucified into sex? Why were we not left rounded off, and finished in ourselves, As we began, As he certainly began, so perfectly alone? A far, was-it-audible scream, Or did it sound on the plasm direct? Worse than the cry of the new-born, A scream, A yell, A shout, A pæan, A death-agony, A birth-cry, A submission, All tiny, tiny, far away, reptile under the first dawn. War-cry, triumph, acute-delight, death-scream reptilian, Why was the veil torn? The silken shriek of the soul's torn membrane? The male soul's membrane Torn with a shriek half music, half horror. Crucifixion. Male tortoise, cleaving behind the hovel-wall of that dense female, Mounted and tense, spread-eagle, out-reaching out of the shell In tortoise-nakedness, Long neck, and long vulnerable limbs extruded, spread-eagle over her house-roof, And the deep, secret, all-penetrating tail curved beneath her walls, Reaching and gripping tense, more reaching anguish in uttermost tension Till suddenly, in the spasm of coition, tupping like a jerking leap, and oh! Opening its clenched face from his outstretched neck And giving that fragile yell, that scream, Super-audible, From his pink, cleft, old-man's mouth, Giving up the ghost, Or screaming in Pentecost, receiving the ghost. His scream, and his moment's subsidence, The moment of eternal silence, Yet unreleased, and after the moment, the sudden, startling jerk of coition, and at once The inexpressible faint yell — And so on, till the last plasm of my body was melted back To the primeval rudiments of life, and the secret. So he tups, and screams Time after time that frail, torn scream After each jerk, the longish interval, The tortoise eternity, Agelong, reptilian persistence, Heart-throb, slow heart-throb, persistent for the next spasm. I remember, when I was a boy, I heard the scream of a frog, which was caught with his foot in the mouth of an up-starting snake; I remember when I first heard bull-frogs break into sound in the spring; I remember hearing a wild goose out of the throat of night Cry loudly, beyond the lake of waters; I remember the first time, out of a bush in the darkness, a nightingale's piercing cries and gurgles startled the depths of my soul; I remember the scream of a rabbit as I went through a wood at midnight; I remember the heifer in her heat, blorting and blorting through the hours, persistent and irrepressible; I remember my first terror hearing the howl of weird, amorous cats; I remember the scream of a terrified, injured horse, the sheet-lightning And running away from the sound of a woman in labor, something like an owl whooing, And listening inwardly to the first bleat of a lamb, The first wail of an infant, And my mother singing to herself, And the first tenor singing of the passionate throat of a young collier, who has long since drunk himself to death, The first elements of foreign speech On wild dark lips. And more than all these, And less than all these, This last, Strange, faint coition yell Of the male tortoise at extremity, Tiny from under the very edge of the farthest far-off horizon of life. The cross, The wheel on which our silence first is broken, Sex, which breaks up our integrity, our single inviolability, our deep silence Tearing a cry from us. Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us calling across the deeps, calling, calling for the complement, Singing, and calling, and singing again, being answered, having found. Torn, to become whole again, after long seeking for what is lost, The same cry from the tortoise as from Christ, the Osiris-cry of abandonment, That which is whole, torn asunder, That which is in part, finding its whole again throughout the universe.

Minnesota snapping turtles clutched by little cities are wet busts of moonstone wreathed in scum, the gray self sugared, half a lot of granite phlegm stopped upon a chaise longue, that incoming pod of him dunked, thorny hooves aswim. Lichen licked him, then he quivered in the stem, and didactic stoicism stitched him tight with a neat twine. Even when tapped on the back by a barefoot tricyclist with a bulging wheaten midriff, he does not respond except that a flagellant paddling worm nested in the necropolis of his nape twists in disgust under the skin, keeping all the grim social hate safe in him.

Who would be a turtle who could help it? A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet, she can ill afford the chances she must take in rowing toward the grasses that she eats. Her track is graceless, like dragging a packing-case places, and almost any slope defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical, she's often stuck up to the axle on her way to something edible. With everything optimal, she skirts the ditch which would convert her shell into a serving dish. She lives below luck-level, never imagining some lottery will change her load of pottery to wings. Her only levity is patience, the sport of truly chastened things.

Night deepening, frost leans on the stables of thoroughbreds, west wind splitting their hooves. —LI HO, “Twenty-three Poems about Horses” Steed out of my dusk and a dusk, now, for the species, veins deltawise down your silky inner thigh, veins trickling from one eye down the roan cliffside of a nose vaulted and chanceled for winds of the Pleistocene, you have come, you paw patiently, that is the main thing, the fields between stretch wider and we, the restless, are everywhere save where your nostril quivers, arches, and you snort in the night. We who debouch into all places dream of you now nowhere. You come to a woman’s hand: that smile. You come to a child’s hand, giggling and shivers. Your hot breath pleasures soldiers. Harnessed to caisson with bannered coffin, to the barouche at a state wedding, you are ambassador from the eldest kingdom. The King of Brazil sent a forest of teak to pave the streets girdling the Pantheon, to muffle the clatter you hauled there. When we spurred you against Wellington’s infantry squares, you side-ran them or reared back. The god of catasrophes took note. Sad banner you were in the prophecies of Sweet Medicine, the whiskered whitneys bringing and spawning your manes and tails among the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Lakota, Kiowa, your speed between their loins a drumming into decline. Under Tutankhamun, the generalissimo who rode you hummed his tenth title: Overseer of Works in the Hill of Gritstone, while there in those Works among the pulling men pulled also your brother, sent down because of a freakish temperament. Muir knew you on both shores, and van der Post knew you, mufti lords recognizing a lord in service. Nuzzle them both. They say that Poseidon at Onchestos, breaking you as a colt, had your driver leap off where the road entered forest, and watched to see what you’d do, the rig rattling--smash it against the trunks on the run, or walk it through tall shadows. Where you linger for shade on the veldt, branches level, a tree is the only tree. Your water, the only water. Flickers of hair along your neck’s crest release the only signal. Which staggers from storm cloud to browse oats. Stubby melted candle, your recessed phallus makes no howitzer but glistens a coat whose sheen ripples off. For I imagine that Li Ho, seeing good men misused as you were, foresaw your withdrawal from our night grasses. For your standing here re-ordains neither Akhilleus nor Cuchulain. Dew braids your mane with fresh constellations. For what shall we make of you, made into goddess, mare sacrificed but receiving cult also among the footloose on the steppes: mother ridden by god-spear, great mam thus captured, cinched, spurred? though your flanks shudder unfettered. Through mists we flash bits of mirror, but from them you pound abreast, neither parent, eyes orbing the two sides. For that demigod’s eye, tiding, capsizes anyone who would turn trainer. And this one goes on into the bond. A trainer aims at one thing, but what tingles him is force hinting at the uncontainable, the opponent. And the top tamers, spook-soothers, the whisperers, will write their books but miss the appointment. It is not inscribed. The two grooms beside you in Hokusai’s whitewater cascade lave you with splashes of it, currying your bulk, hoisting your nosebag--and no one has set the timer, everywhere it is one sound, stampede steadied and rocking in it. Your great-grandparents, unicorn wild asses from Persia and Scythia, fostered childbirth but also pissed plagues, the unharnessable summum totium browsing in ocean, an eye-spangled three-legged mountain. Hell and cloud in your seed! It was your miniature stature at the beginning, Maria Tallchief at ten, that wedged you between giants into the straightaway. And the reindeer modeled from smudge in the Font de Gaume grotto at Les Eyzies, fading across your body, trails a third antler like a skater’s scarf through your head, broadening out, a dancer’s arm rippling after the total gather. Looking back from the pass at his mounted escorts, flashing them three turns back down the corkscrew, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama saw them slumped on your back, the red of Rahu in splashes and trickling stillness. And dripping you still awaited their nudges. In that patience, the kernel of the twister moan-lifting over Kansas, the shrapnel clatter of your take-off. Across that aftermath, bubbling through wind-sound or the mind’s rise from its cringe, the flubber-flutter of moody-moodlessness. So the unforeseen from you opposes the blindly seen in us-- your fuse as a spurter, jump-taker, yet a curb also to our unsnaffled berserkness. For the berserking Greek says that only that ass’s horn or hoof, cut off and cupped upward, can hold any of the cold torrent under the world, implacable Styx, All else, graces or muons, it crumbles. And every jot which that flow dissolves, the images with their assessors, has rolled in us. And you have stood calmly beside us, your shot breath a bloom in the cold, your hooves hammers yet also the last and only chalice. The unreached-for cup, beaker for world-toxin, breast englobing ground zero. And so we know you not. And I realize: though I have walked drenched in spring rains my bare thighs have not hugged your warm bellows in a downpour. For though your manic tribe is mine, the boreal chargers, mere rooms, a migrant’s mangy stations, have detained me. For while historians of cultures hot on the spoor of roots among their root clans have heard you drum past, they looked up only briefly. For though engravers assumed you would stay, given their way with your musculature, accoutrements, wavy harness, tip-toe grooms, gear draped over your cruppers like an evening gown, its ratios and metalwork continuous with Genghis Khan’s and a jockey’s, their inky mastery frames cosily misleading questions: which posthouse this evening, what pasture tomorrow? Whereas you inquire into rupture and the unfenced: what thunder between flesh and ground, what surge from the cells even past sundown?

They’ve perched for hours on that window-ledge, scarcely moving. Beak to beak, a matched set, they differ almost imperceptibly— like salt and pepper shakers. It’s an event when they tuck (simultaneously) their pinpoint heads into lavender vests of fat. But reminiscent of clock hands blandly turning because they must have turned—somehow, they’ve taken on the grave, small-eyed aspect of monks hooded in conferences so intimate nothing need be said. If some are chuckling in the park, earning their bread, these are content to let the dark engulf them— it’s all the human imagination can fathom, how single-mindedly mindless two silhouettes stand in a window thick as milk glass. They appear never to have fed on anything else when they stir all of a sudden to peck savagely, for love or hygiene, at the grimy feathers of the other; but when they resume their places, the shift is one only a painter or a barber (prodding a chin back into position) would be likely to notice.

There, Robert, you have kill'd that fly — , And should you thousand ages try The life you've taken to supply, You could not do it. You surely must have been devoid Of thought and sense, to have destroy'd A thing which no way you annoy'd — You'll one day rue it. Twas but a fly perhaps you'll say, That's born in April, dies in May; That does but just learn to display His wings one minute, And in the next is vanish'd quite. A bird devours it in his flight — Or come a cold blast in the night, There's no breath in it. The bird but seeks his proper food — And Providence, whose power endu'd That fly with life, when it thinks good, May justly take it. But you have no excuses for't — A life by Nature made so short, Less reason is that you for sport Should shorter make it. A fly a little thing you rate — But, Robert do not estimate A creature's pain by small or great; The greatest being Can have but fibres, nerves, and flesh, And these the smallest ones possess, Although their frame and structure less Escape our seeing.

for Patti Smith At the end of Bing Crosby’s Riding High his horse Will be buried in the clay of the racetrack where he fell, As a lesson for all of us. Sad, waggish Bing, The Mob didn’t want Broadway Bill to win, so the jockey Pulled on the reins until the thoroughbred, straining Over the finish line first, collapsed, heart attack. I loved you like a guitar string breaking Under the conviction of a clumsy hand— Something like that . . . I suppose I must have Been thinking of you and your complex and beautiful band, Except the image demands I hold the guitar, If not you, and the broken string, as Over and over loudspeakers call riders to the starting gate. The track bartender and a teller, a sharpshooter and the chess master Wrestler, the petty con man and a cop, reprise their parts. The heist gang dons clown masks, and Sherry will betray George, and Johnny can’t love Fay, And the fortune in the suitcase just blows away.

She dances to the wheeze of my lungs. Were she taller, or had she both hind legs, she would lick my aching knees. There’s nothing like practice I firmly believe. Practice makes the heart grow fond. When the graft heals, you’ve apples on a cherry tree, delicious domestic freaks. I had a splendid grandmother, I might have made her up. She wore cotton dresses, usually blue, and glasses with thin gold frames and plastic cushions for the nose. The plastic was slightly pink, intended to blend with the flesh. She never raised her voice. Her knuckles enlarged, her goiter enlarged. There are ways within ways. A man will go down displaying himself in a nursing home. The mystery left, and there’s more than when we began, has nothing to do with reticence, or safety.

I should be dumb before thee, feathered sage! And gaze upon thy phiz with solemn awe, But for a most audacious wish to gauge The hoarded wisdom of thy learned craw. Art thou, grave bird! so wondrous wise indeed? Speak freely, without fear of jest or gibe— What is thy moral and religious creed? And what the metaphysics of thy tribe? A Poet, curious in birds and brutes, I do not question thee in idle play; What is thy station? What are thy pursuits? Doubtless thou hast thy pleasures—what are they? Or is’t thy wont to muse and mouse at once, Entice thy prey with airs of meditation, And with the unvarying habits of a dunce, To dine in solemn depths of contemplation? There may be much—the world at least says so— Behind that ponderous brow and thoughtful gaze; Yet such a great philosopher should know, It is by no means wise to think always. And, Bird, despite thy meditative air, I hold thy stock of wit but paltry pelf— Thou show’st that same grave aspect everywhere, And wouldst look thoughtful, stuffed, upon a shelf. I grieve to be so plain, renowned Bird— Thy fame’s a flam, and thou an empty fowl; And what is more, upon a Poet’s word I’d say as much, wert thou Minerva’s owl. So doff th’ imposture of those heavy brows; They do not serve to hide thy instincts base— And if thou must be sometimes munching mouse, Munch it, O Owl! with less profound a face.