Identity

When Hans Hofmann became a hedgehog somewhere in a Germany that has vanished with its forests and hedgerows Shakespeare would have been a young actor starting out in a country that was only a word to Hans who had learned from those who had painted animals only from hearing tales about them without ever setting eyes on them or from corpses with the lingering light mute and deathly still forever held fast in the fur or the feathers hanging or lying on a table and he had learned from others who had arranged the corpses of animals as though they were still alive in full flight or on their way but this hedgehog was there in the same life as his own looking around at him with his brush of camel hair and his stretched parchment of sheepskin as he turned to each sharp particular quill and every black whisker on the long live snout and those flat clawed feet made only for trundling and for feeling along the dark undersides of stones and as Hans took them in he turned into the Hans that we would see