slicing this frozen sky know
where they are going —
and want to get there.
Their call, both strange
and familiar, calls
to the strange and familiar
heart, and the landscape
becomes the landscape
of being, which becomes
the bright silos and snowy
fields over which the nuanced
and muscular geese
are calling — while time
and the heart take measure.
pigs prey to piggishnesses. get ate from the rooter to the tooter.
I’ m a hog for you baby, I can’ t get enough go the wolfish crooner.
the gust buffeted porker roll in the hay or laid down
in twig rapine. let me in, let me in.
The conversations of the French
Quarter mules in their stables
after a full day of pulling
tourists and voters over cobble-
stones is not espresso witty
and in their dark no TVs feed
them news of the ends of mules
elsewhere in the Middle East
and West. In our stables the ends
of others are a fact of atmosphere.
The yoyos on the mystery island
nextdoor are revving familiar tools
in backyard now gripped by failure
first of electricity than of
a meaner something that’ ll grow
and then Tony showed us the lake
where he had thrown some of his sadness last summer
and it had dissolved like powder
so he thought maybe the lake could take
some of the radiant, aluminum kind
he had been making lately.
And it did.
It was a perfect lake,
none of the paint had chipped off,
no bolts showing, the arms that Dante
Like everyone, I wanted my animal
to be the hawk.
I thought I wanted the strength
to eat the eyes first then tear
into the fuse box of the chest
and soar away.
I needed help because I still
cowered under the shadow of my father,
a man who inspected picture tubes
five out of seven nights,
Once I wasn’ t always so plain.
I was strewn feathers on a cross
of dune, an expanse of ocean
at my feet, garlands of gulls.
Sirens and gulls. They couldn’ t tame you.
You know as well as they: to be
a dove is to bear the falcon
at your breast, your nights, your seas.
My fear is simple, heart-faced
above a flare of etchings, a lineage
in letters, my sudden stare. It’ s you.
loquitur the sparrow in the Zoo
No bars are set too close, no mesh too fine
To keep me from the eagle and the lion,
Whom keepers feed that I may freely dine.
This goes to show that if you have the wit
To be small, common, cute, and live on shit,
Though the cage fret kings, you may make free with it.
September 1956
Outside the hotel window, unenlightened pigeons
weave and dive like Stukas on their prey,
apparently some tiny insect brother.
(In India, the attainment of nonviolence
is considered a proper goal for human beings.)
If one of the pigeons should fly into the illusion
I’ m having trouble looking animals in the eye.
Their empty suits in outer space!
Monkeys injected with a virus to show off
Our eminent domain, the nervous system.
Teacup pigs we breed and obsessive mice
Worrying themselves bald in a miniature opera.
For pleasures of the tongue we are
Winking cattle out of meadows
Slashing their throats and swiftly quartering them.
In riding habits with gold flame pins we ride horses
To hounds, chase a fennec fox until his red
Coat flares up against the extinction
We stopped at a farmer’ s house
before parking at the dock
that creaked over the river.
Rowboats for rent, five bucks
an hour, twenty for the day.
Deep water: I knew a canvas bag
was in the trunk. I knew lunch
would be roast beef sandwiches
and hot stew from a thermos,
chunks of carrot and potatoes
cut by my mother who slept
through the racket of our leaving.
