163 Animal poems

Seven of them pinned in blood by long, shiny tails, three of them still alive and writhing against the wood, their heaviness whipping the wall as they try to break free, rattles beating in unison, hisses slowly dying in silence, the other four hanging stiff like ropes to another life, patterns of torn skin dripping with power and loss, the wonder of who might have done this turning in shock as all seven suddenly come alive when I get closer, pink mouths trembling with white fangs, lunging at me then falling back, entangled in one another to form twisted letters that spell a bloody word I can’t understand.

This dog standing in the middle of the street, tail stiff, fur bushy with fear, and a pedigree rabbit, its neck broken and bleeding beneath his paws, might have been forgiven or simply taken away and shot under different circumstances and no one would have said much, except his owner who’d gone out into the yard at the start of the commotion, having been involved at other times with the dog’s truancies, and yelled, “Bosco, Bosco, goddamnit!” but unavailing, and everyone understanding that once more Bosco had been taken over by the dark corner of his nature. But this other sentiment we shared as well: the man Who’d raised the rabbit shouldn’t husband something so rare and beautiful he couldn’t keep it from the likes of Bosco.

The regal eagle sits alone upon a tree that serves as throne. But sometimes when the eagle flies (though this might come as some surprise) a mob of crows may—wing to wing— together drive away that king. Democracy in beak and claw finds regal eagle's fatal flaw. And is that legal? I don't know. You'll have to ask a mobster crow.

Barbed wires on rusted nails can’t hold lone bulls at home when they smell pasture. They thrust their bone skulls under barbs, tongues quivering for a taste of strange and shove until the post gives way. Days later, we find wires sagging, reset the post, and tighten bent wires like a fiddle and rope the worn-out bull, wishing there was only a fence between us and our heart’s desire. But something with spurs and a rope would find us, cursing and yelling on horseback, cutting us from escape down arroyos, dragging us frothing and wild-eyed back to the sun-bleached yellow range, the same whirlpool of buzzards.

The rise of the zebra hurts the zebra. As if she would breathe fire. If  we put natural gold and the black blue into the loaf of  bread it bursts. Find and shove, open and wound. The oars when kneaded in and then stretched, row. How they bump into wheat on the white surface again. Mašenka! There are three corpses in Gravel Cave. One keeps silent. One snowballs. One conceals.

Somehow pesters the sadness of a dog—that ungiven guardedness at first report of day in a slyly chosen alley; not the cat hidden in the bougainvillaea blossom, not the bull barefaced into the lissome highway, it’s a madness less to do with mordant Englishness in a glum phototropic teat, more a perky realpolitik in over-familiar mottled skin. That hoarse howl at the garden’s shrub-ridden edge, that shawl a woman knits, waiting for a man who’s not her man—not a man at all—then crouching by the bedpost mewling. * When to be tame is at most a disavowal in proxy to the master’s unacknowledged fear: knowing fear as part of privilege, knowing privilege a state infeasible, the amenable innate animal to whom we assign the affectionate name —Bango, Napoleon, Spot—bounding resolutely into the black-red greenness of the middle sea— believes itself to be human in dogly garb, a non-veg incarnation of mortal virtue, no less than a wife, child, comrade in armless charms. We nurture this notion, lure it to the rug. * So even if it steal to the street trailing a fog- -dust deliberate, choosing mange over matter to be free—deranged, sheltering in a truck’s dappled shade, but dreading the hunger-dusk or charity at noon—if it claim its independence among curs, dodging some dog-chief, teeth clenched, lurking in building societies— it still will count the hand that carries the house in a fist, or follow, for a glance, a humanist. Paused between doorstep and forest, both gone; kept in equilibrium, the sadness of a dog.

Minutes ago those quick cleft hoofs lifted the dik-dik’s speckled frame. Now the cheetah dips her delicate head to the still-pulsating guts. Our Rover’s so close we need no zoom to fix the green shot of her eyes, the matted red mess of her face. You come here, recall a father hale in his ordinary life, not his last bed, not the long tasteless slide of tapioca. This is the Great Rift, where it all began, here where the warthogs and hartebeest feed in the scrub, giraffes splay to drink, and our rank diesel exhaust darkens the air for only a few moments before vanishing.

The rooster pushes his head high among the hens, trying to be what he feels he must be, here in the confines of domesticity. Before the tall legs of my presence, he bristles and shakes his ruby comb. Little man, I want to say the hens know who they are. I want to ease his mistaken burden, want him to crow with the plain ecstasy of morning light as it finds its winter way above the woods. Poor outnumbered fellow, how did he come to believe that on his plumed shoulders lay the safety of an entire flock? I run my hand down the rippled brindle of his back, urge him to relax, drink in the female pleasures that surround him, of egg laying, of settling warm-breasted in the nest of this brief and feathered time.

You think we are the pointed argument, the man drunk at the party showing off his gun collection, the bed of nettles. What we really are is hidden from you: girl weeping in the closet among her stepfather's boots; tuft of rabbit fur caught in barbed wire; body of the baby in the landfill; boy with the shy mouth playing his guitar at the picnic table, out in the dirt yard. We slide into this world benign and pliable, quills pressed down smooth over back and tail. Only one hour here stiffens the barbs into thousands of quick retorts. Everything this well-guarded remembers being soft once.

When his owner died in 2000 and a new family moved into their Moscow apartment, he went to live with mongrels in the park. In summer there was plenty of food, kids often left behind sandwiches, hotdogs and other stuff. He didn’t have a big appetite, still missing his old guy. He too was old, the ladies no longer excited him, and he didn’t burn calories chasing them around. Then winter came and the little folk abandoned the park. The idea of eating from the trash occurred to him but the minute he started rummaging in the overturned garbage container, a voice in his head said: “No, Rex!” The remnants of a good upbringing lower our natural survival skills. I met him again in the early spring of 2001. He looked terrific. Turning gray became him. His dark shepherd eyes were perfectly bright, like those of a puppy. I asked him how he sustained himself in this new free-market situation when even the human species suffered from malnutrition. In response he told me his story; how at first he thought that life without his man wasn’t worth it, how those who petted him when he was a pet then turned away from him, and how one night he had a revelation. His man came to him in his sleep, tapped him on his skinny neck and said: “Let’s go shopping!” So the next morning he took the subway and went to the street market where they used to go together every Sunday and where vendors recognized him and fed him to his heart’s content. “Perhaps you should move closer to that area?” I ventured.—“No, I’ll stay here,” he sighed, “oldies shouldn’t change their topography. That’s what my man said.” Indeed, he sounded like one himself.