163 Animal poems

Muzzle and jowl and beastly brow, bilious glaring eyes, tufted ears, recidivous criminality in the slouch, —This is not the latest absconding bankrupt but a ‘beautiful’ tiger imported at great expense from Kuala Lumpur. 7 photographers, 4 black-and-white artists and an R.A. are taking his profitable likeness; 28 reporters and an essayist are writing him up. Sundry ladies think he is a darling especially at mealtimes, observing that a firm near the docks advertises replicas fullgrown on approval for easy cash payments. ♂Felis Tigris (Straits Settlements) (Bobo) takes exercise up and down his cage before feeding in a stench of excrements of great cats indifferent to beauty or brutality. He is said to have eaten several persons but of course you can never be quite sure of these things.

Her handlers, dressed in vests and flannel pants, Step forward in the weak winter light Leading a behemoth among elephants, Topsy, to another exhibition site; Caparisoned with leather bridle, Six impassive tons of carnival delight Shambles on among spectators who sidle Nervously off, for the brute has killed At least three men, most recently an idle Hanger-on at shows, who, given to distilled Diversions, fed her a live cigar. Since become a beast of burden, Topsy thrilled The crowds in her palmy days, and soon will star Once more, in an electrocution, Which incident, though it someday seem bizarre, Is now a new idea in execution. Topsy has been fed an unaccustomed treat, A few carrots laced with cyanide, And copper plates have been fastened to her feet, Wired to cables running off on either side; She stamps two times in irritation, Then waits, for elephants, having a thick hide, Know how to be patient. The situation Seems dreamlike, till someone throws a switch, And the huge body shakes for the duration Of five or six unending seconds, in which Smoke rises and Topsy’s trunk contracts And twelve thousand mammoth pounds finally pitch To earth, as the current breaks and all relax. It is a scene shot with shades of grey— The smoke, the animal, the reported facts— On a seasonably grey and gloomy day. Would you care to see any of that again? See it as many times as you please, For an electrician, Thomas Edison, Has had a bright idea we call the movies, And called on for monitory spark, Has preserved it all in framed transparencies That are clear as day, for all the day is dark. You might be amused on second glance To note the background—it’s an amusement park!— A site on Coney Island where elephants Are being used in the construction, And where Topsy, through a keeper’s negligence, Got loose, causing some property destruction, And so is shown to posterity, A study in images and conduction, Sunday, January 4th, 1903.

Someone must have seen an old dog dragging its broken body through the wet grass; someone should have known it was lost, drinking from the old well, then lifting its head to the wind off the bottoms, and someone might have wanted that dog trailing its legs along the ground like vines sliding up the creek searching for sun; but they were not there when the dog wandered through Turley’s Woods looking for food and stopped beneath the thorn trees and wrapped its tail around its nose until it was covered by falling leaves that piled up and up until there was no lost dog at all to hear the distant voice calling through the timber, only a tired heart breathing slower, and breath, soft as mist, above the leaves.

How to explain my heroic courtesy? I feel that my body was inflated by a mischievous boy. Once I was the size of a falcon, the size of a lion, once I was not the elephant I find I am. My pelt sags, and my master scolds me for a botched trick. I practiced it all night in my tent, so I was somewhat sleepy. People connect me with sadness and, often, rationality. Randall Jarrell compared me to Wallace Stevens, the American poet. I can see it in the lumbering tercets, but in my mind I am more like Eliot, a man of Europe, a man of cultivation. Anyone so ceremonious suffers breakdowns. I do not like the spectacular experiments with balance, the high-wire act and cones. We elephants are images of humility, as when we undertake our melancholy migrations to die. Did you know, though, that elephants were taught to write the Greek alphabet with their hooves? Worn out by suffering, we lie on our great backs, tossing grass up to heaven—as a distraction, not a prayer. That’s not humility you see on our long final journeys: it’s procrastination. It hurts my heavy body to lie down.

The bears are kept by hundreds within fences, are fed cracked Eggs; the weakest are Slaughtered and fed to the others after being scented With the blood of deer brought to the pastures by Elizabeth’s Men—the blood spills from deep pails with bottoms of slate. The balding Queen had bear gardens in London and in the country. The bear is baited: the nostrils Are blown full with pepper, the Irish wolf dogs Are starved, then, emptied, made crazy with fermented barley: And the bear’s hind leg is chained to a stake, the bear Is blinded and whipped, kneeling in his own blood and slaver, he is Almost instantly worried by the dogs. At the very moment that Elizabeth took Essex’s head, a giant brown bear Stood in the gardens with dogs hanging from his fur. . . He took away the sun, took A wolfhound in his mouth, and tossed it into The white lap of Elizabeth I—arrows and staves rained On his chest, and standing, he, then, stood even taller, seeing Into the Queen’s private boxes—he grinned Into her battered eggshell face. Another volley of arrows and poles, and opening his mouth He showered Blood all over Elizabeth and her Privy Council. The very next evening, a cool evening, the Queen demanded Thirteen bears and the justice of 113 dogs: she slept All that Sunday night and much of the next morning. Some said she was guilty of this and that. The Protestant Queen gave the defeated bear A grave in a Catholic cemetery. The marker said: Peter, a Solstice Bear, a gift of the Tsarevitch to Elizabeth. After a long winter she had the grave opened. The bear’s skeleton Was cleared with lye, she placed it at her bedside, Put a candle inside behind the sockets of the eyes, and, then She spoke to it: You were a Christmas bear—behind your eyes I see the walls of a snow cave where you are a cub still smelling Of your mother’s blood which has dried in your hair; you have Troubled a Queen who was afraid When seated in shade which, standing, You had created! A Queen who often wakes with a dream Of you at night— Now, you’ll stand by my bed in your long white bones; alone, you Will frighten away at night all visions of bear, and all day You will be in this cold room—your constant grin, You’ll stand in the long, white prodigy of your bones, and you are, Every inch of you, a terrible vision, not bear, but virgin!

Nimble, preserved together, milkweed-white rears upturned, female tule elk bowed into rustling foxtails. Males muscled over the slopes, jostling mantles, marking terrain. Their antlers clambered wide, steep as the gorges. As they fed, those branches twitched, sensory, delicate, yet when one buck reared squaring to look at us his antlers and his gaze held suddenly motionless. Further out, the skeleton. The tar paper it seemed to lie on was hide. Vertebrae like redwood stumps— an uneven heart-shaped cavern where a coccyx curled to its tip. Ribs fanned open hollow, emptied of organs. In the bushes its skull. Sockets and sinuses, mandible, its few small teeth. All bare now except that fur the red-brown color of a young boy’s head and also of wild iris stalks in winter still clung to the drying scalp. Below the eye’s rim sagged flat as a bicycle tire. The form was sinking away. The skin loosened, becoming other, shedding the mask that hides but must also reveal a creature. Off amid cliffs and hills some unfleshed force roamed free. In the wind, I felt the half-life I watched watch me. Elk, I said, I see you abandon this life, this earth— I stood for a time with the bones.

To push and push with raw pink claws like hands of shin. To tunnel my love through wet earth, wet stars — no one needs the underneath like me. I give you permission to grip me. To patrol the worm-drench of my thinking. To bite a worm’s head and cure the rest as cache. Your flesh, my flesh, your dead as dead, buried like a feeling. To push through that wet, a scrum of worms whittling my skin like a premonition. To have pushed mountains into hills, ragged sooth from the slid wall of healing. “Nothing,” said the suicide, “is as sad as recovery.” To work myself forward like a noun or an entry.

Written in the Autumn of the Year of the Horse 2002 I have run on middle fingernail through Eolithic morning, I have thundered down the coach road with the Revolution’s warning. I have carried countless errant knights who never found the grail. I have strained before the caissons I have moved the nation’s mail. I’ve made knights of lowly tribesmen and kings from ranks of peons I have given pride and arrogance to riding men for eons. I have grazed among the lodges and the tepees and the yurts. I have felt the sting of driving whips, lashes, spurs and quirts. I am roguish – I am flighty – I am inbred – I am lowly. I’m a nightmare – I am wild – I am the horse. I am gallant and exalted – I am stately – I am noble. I’m impressive – I am grand – I am the horse. I have suffered gross indignities from users and from winners, I have felt the hand of kindness from the losers and the sinners. I have given for the cruel hand and given for the kind. Heaved a sigh at Appomattox when surrender had been signed. I can be as tough as hardened steel – as fragile as a flower. I know not my endurance and I know not my own power. I have died with heart exploded ’neath the cheering in the stands - Calmly stood beneath the hanging noose of vigilante bands. I have traveled under conqueror and underneath the beaten. I have never chosen sides – I am the horse. The world is but a player’s stage – my roles have numbered many. Under blue or under gray – I am the horse. So I’ll run on middle fingernail until the curtain closes, And I will win your triple crowns and I will wear your roses. Toward you who took my freedom I’ve no malice or remorse. I’ll endure – This Is My Year – I am the Horse!

Dog sees white. Arctic light, the bright buzz in the brain of pure crystal adrenaline. In a flash he is out the door and across the street looking for snowshoe hares, caribou, cats. His wild ancestry ignited, Dog plunges his nose into snow up to his eyes. He sees his dreams. Master yells from the front porch but Dog can’t hear him. Dog hears nothing except the roar of the wind across the tundra, the ancient existential cry of wolves, pure, devastating, hungry. Time for crunchies. Taking many detours, Dog returns to the porch. Let master think what he wants. Freedom comes at a price.

My dog has died. I buried him in the garden next to a rusted old machine. Some day I'll join him right there, but now he's gone with his shaggy coat, his bad manners and his cold nose, and I, the materialist, who never believed in any promised heaven in the sky for any human being, I believe in a heaven I'll never enter. Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom where my dog waits for my arrival waving his fan-like tail in friendship. Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth, of having lost a companion who was never servile. His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine withholding its authority, was the friendship of a star, aloof, with no more intimacy than was called for, with no exaggerations: he never climbed all over my clothes filling me full of his hair or his mange, he never rubbed up against my knee like other dogs obsessed with sex. No, my dog used to gaze at me, paying me the attention I need, the attention required to make a vain person like me understand that, being a dog, he was wasting time, but, with those eyes so much purer than mine, he'd keep on gazing at me with a look that reserved for me alone all his sweet and shaggy life, always near me, never troubling me, and asking nothing. Ai, how many times have I envied his tail as we walked together on the shores of the sea in the lonely winter of Isla Negra where the wintering birds filled the sky and my hairy dog was jumping about full of the voltage of the sea's movement: my wandering dog, sniffing away with his golden tail held high, face to face with the ocean's spray. Joyful, joyful, joyful, as only dogs know how to be happy with only the autonomy of their shameless spirit. There are no good-byes for my dog who has died, and we don't now and never did lie to each other. So now he's gone and I buried him, and that's all there is to it.