The Animal Hennets
by Edmond Wright
WATER-SNAIL
Up the glass goes the water-snail. Its long fawn
foot is as flat as the glass. Body as foot.
There are waves in this glue, made with an indrawn
pressure, release, flowing down like some moiré
shadows, shifts on a shot-silk ribbon; input,
output, like hovercrafts', hidden. This relay
to the back is what pushes the slow snail on,
there where its sensitive horns are exploring.
It's a writing on time of music no one
hears, of a poetry soundlessly pouring
in the service of feeling. See the tiny
mouth that's cleaning the glass, eating the algae.
ANTS
Little models of atoms these ants, and as
similar. Dumb-bells, rattles, or ethnic beads.
See them programmed to follow. Each of them has
pincers and acid as the tribal weapons.
Cannot choose but attack whatever impedes
locked-in instruction. Can be called citizens
if you look at the city, the queen, the stores,
nurseries, roadways and soldiers, but they can't
if you notice these orders cannot be laws,
kept to pernickety rule. Programs won't grant
that a change might be better, while in our nest
we are always so shrewd at choosing the best.
BLACKBIRD
Is a clerk as a male, as a monk, female;
both neatly tailored, precise in their bouncing.
When they run, they're big-footed, neck out and tail
spread, a policeman after the criminal,
but the quarry's a worm — such acute pouncing,
serious yanking. One stands as sentinel,
turning head like the deaf. Orange beak on black,
bold as belisha beacon, as its alarm,
'Trink-a-trink!', on the silence, more an attack
than a retreat. Seems secure against all harm
and it sings just as certainly. It's a con
such success: each one seems to be the same one.
TIGER
See their coat is the grass and sun and shadow
centuries leave when you're hiding from your prey.
Evolution the anvil. Those long canines show
thousands of trappings of flesh not a hammer
from the heavenly forge. Claws curve to doomsday
devils' malevolence, not wrought to damn a
soul to hell but to hold the deer's hide secure
while incisors are cutting the jugular.
See the fire in the eyes alert for the lure
grazing unknowing. This killed a zemindar,
but its lameness was cause. So never monstrous.
It still serves as a trope for the Unconscious.
LION
Not machismo — the females are the hunters.
Manes are no more than the fluffing of pigeons'
necks, a sign to the mate of the swaggerer's
genes. So the MGM lion, a statue's
or a gatepost's protector, the talisman's
majesty, soldierly glory, the tattoo's
be-toothed masculine menace, the heraldic
emblem's hauteur in the glare or the rampant
or the couchant position, the chivalric
prancing with claws in erection, complacent,
proud pretence of aggression is exhibitive,
dependent, adolescent, competitive.
ELEPHANT
Here the face has been poured into the phallus.
Crozier-power made manipulating.
The authority's body is made callous,
wrinkled, all sole, except for the snail-horn nose
as it pries and enmoulds its speculating,
tentative end. And the tusks — would one oppose
all that mass at those points? What those five nails
show is a hand that comes down. These four-pillared
mausoleums that shift like ghosts have string tails,
caricatures of the ponderous forward,
turning patriarch backside. As they galumph
in the mud, hear the trumpets fanfare triumph.
CROCODILE
What is human distortion, chevaux-de-frise
teeth, and a torturer's grin, Uriah Heep
in abasement, spread-bellied, a debauchee's
scaly, carbuncled hide, old, heavy-browed eyes
with their periscope watchfulness, that can peep
out of reflected open sky in the guise
of two bubbles or stones, a body all tail,
snake with four rakes as feet, served by sycophant
birds that peck away leeches in the jaw's gaol,
ancient in youth, cold in the heat, repugnant
to the mammal's lithe warmth, is no mystery —
Put the reptile's beside human history.
CHIMPANZEE
He is much too near. Everyone sees it and
misses it. Chimps even understand language —
going too far, for soon he will understand
more, laugh at us for being so chimpanzee
(or resenting the 'speciesism'). Image
open to irony both ways. What degree
in that scratching turns comic? Told off for his
cuffing a dog, see that human guilt in eyes
that are looking inside himself. A disguise,
yes, see his spectacles, minstrel grins! — It is
what we do at the zoo, mocking as we pass
(to sustain what identity?) race, age, class.
STUFFED SNAKE
This white cobra is stuffed. Some taxidermist
set up its coils and its sphinx-like head as if
it is going to strike. See — it could have hissed,
though it is nothing but death threatening death.
It is poised on a pretzel of self, as stiff,
dry and as hollow as eggshell. There's no breath
from the menacing mouth, no challenge in dried
eyes. All its venom is dust, but this found art
traps its finding through time. We are horrified
so to have memory unwontedly start,
smarting at what it hid from itself, in rage
to thrust back out of sight the snake in its cage.
MONEY-SPIDER
Used to call it a 'money-spider', because
one on your hand would mean money was coming
to you soon. Wondered — as the spider was
clambering over the hairs on your hand, bead
light as a seed, with whiskers as legs testing
ways forward, hurriedly fussy, and yet keyed
to climb up or to fall, spinning on what it
spun like a ballerina, a micro-kite
that would lift in the slightest waft, exquisite
acrobat, clenched like an embryo so tight
to a fine, shuttling needle of light — whether
it would know its own omen, as fate's feather.
TOWN PIGEONS
Like Egyptians they walk, jerking their profiles.
Azure- and emerald-no-colour on neck.
With their fish-eyes they stare like haughty exiles
scared but concealing their fear, and fluttering
to the side at the last minute. See them check
you as likely donor of scraps, pecking
down at nothing to show you what's what. The wings
burst out of smoothness. When they fly, they decide
all together the turns they must make. Croonings
come from the flock, but from which pigeon? Some pied
white and brown, but most dry-grey as the tarmac
they go scavenging over to ease their lack.
BUTTERFLY
See its flight as a cobble-jolting, or a
shaken mop, book in the wind, or clapping hands
(on a leaf see them pray); or take it for a
snapped thumb that snaps with no sound; a lyrical,
brisk appogiatura not stopping; bands
snipped as they're woven. Zigzagging a fickle
indecision across fences and over
walls is to make the whole of yourself a wave,
leave yourself law-free while trying to scroll a
motto in place beneath a shield, to behave
as the honour of colours demands while air
shifts your flight into spaces that aren't quite there.
GRASSHOPPER
Violinist's angles, struts of a girdered
bridge. The mechanics external, like an earth-
mover, scissors or skeleton. Spring-powered
leg that plays music with lever as bow.
It's a passion-percussion, concerning birth,
death, and survival of species, col legno
'on the Bare Mountain'. Lift-off is safer than
staying with threat, even though you don't know where
you'll come down from the jump: you don't need a plan —
it's so unlikely the same threat will be there
at the end of the rainbow — calculating
it's more likely you'll find a mate is waiting.
GNATS
Like St. Elmo's Fire, ghostly space-revenant,
spindle of gnats, in another dimension,
all renewing renewing through a buoyant,
blurred interlacing of those rising and those
falling, an air waterfall in suspension,
whirligig galaxy of grey stars, yo-yos
in convention, the tops of violin bows,
all trampolining in slow motion, a grave
pavane, always restoring, when the breeze blows,
unlocked intricacies, each elastic wave
knitting back into pattern, making it seem
as if chaos itself were part of the scheme.
BAT
In the twilight burnt paper flickers faster
than in this wind it should, these Chinese-junk wings
that go twinkling in black — a tree has cast a
leaf to another as if they've come alive
and dismember themselves. Twitching skin-skimmings
hunting the moths, an echo, guiding the dive,
that has prickled space with insects squeaking
shape and direction in silence, universe
made of human-deaf frequencies, all speaking
bat-self desire. It has hung like a suede purse
in the noise of the day: now in night's silence
every mote is now ringing in resonance.
DEER
Their togetherness saves. Sensitivity,
tuned to a delicacy hair-sprung, as fine
as the swivelling-petal ear, purity,
childlike, of eye, the fastidious, pausing,
ballerina's foot, quick neck, keep the cervine
herds in their sylvan time-space. It is causing
in the present, this watchfulness, what has through
lucky millennia transferred the model
of itself. All the predators must pursue:
otherwise, none of this lightness and muscle,
like a girl in escape, none of this duty
would be shaped to our eye as daring beauty.
KITTEN
In the garden a plaster cast of Lupa,
Rome's myth of wolf-mother, civilization's
fiction, binding a state with play, with drama —
nature sustaining human kinship. But now
in the twentieth century, this kitten's
taking the symbol back: watch it with that bow
of attack, behind garden pot and wooden
seat, in its tail mock concentration
done with acting-excitement. Watch this kitten-
anticipation of cat, imitation
to a whisker, that matches the leap to bite
at the wolf and the leap away in mock fright.
PARROT
It can hoist itself up with its head. Sydney
Opera House for a beak. A quizzical
eye, red-rimmed. Silhouette from the side — kidney,
embryo. Pendulum sideways-shifts. Colour
from the flowers and leaves of the tropical
plants where its forebears hid. It's an impostor
with a camouflage voice, hiding its mating
cry and its territorial squawk under
all the noises around, dissimulating
so it can live, reproduce itself. No wonder
it can talk like a human being: defence
or attack, the best strategy is pretence.
GEESE
Hear them honking in protest, traffic-anger,
in rhythm, out of it, white bagpipes, the beaks
at the end of the necks like tongs, their clangour
echoing skimmington mockery. Waddling
to attack, they've a spitting snake-hiss that speaks
hate. They're a mob of tumescent threats, jostling
to see who can be jeering the most, gossips
fat with their white Nazi solidarity.
On the river, they're eighteenth-century ships,
bulging, white-sailed, no sign of vulgarity.
They've protected their group, grasped in unity.
Where's the moral, for us, of community?
ROBIN
His suspicion's polite as he inspects to
see if this human's humane. Kind of clerkly
neat precision in act as he looks askew.
Band-major uniform. He's standing at ease
with attention. He takes a liberty
there as you're digging, as if intending to tease,
to hop by on the toe of your boot. Christmas
cards have so altered evolution, even
the unloved won't throw stones, unless the callus
has been rubbed so as to reverse the Eden
garden symbol, negate ideology.
Then, the trustworthy formed the majority.
EAGLE
In the Dordogne. Driving up a narrow
lane in a limestone ravine, turned a corner
to meet ambush of wing, a ten-foot tableau,
open, uncannily still at the first glance,
the whole road spanned across. Became airborne,
slow as a torturer, or hypnotic trance,
with a pulse of intent in symmetrical
fans of black flame, caressing invisible
air to moundings of power, a ritual
curse in huge gesture. Became, now, an eagle
in escape from a car, one of those species
under threat from man's economic disease.
SKYLARK
Has a Doge's tuft, height-symbol, erect for
body-authority, for panoramic
view denied those below, for a meteor,
brilliant, certain in melody, sunlight,
always upward direction, for ecstatic
music prophetic of pure blue-sky delight,
of the solo that trills to horizon and
zenith, a thrilling them through till they are you,
with the wings as aspiring notes that expand,
turning the landscape, the air, the world, into
an immaculate mirror, a mummery.
Hear the skylark proclaim its territory.
LADYBIRD
R2D2's as capsules, but warningly
dotted like Daleks, shiny orange plastic
buttonhole-badges come to life, fridge mini-
magnets, dense black underneath, concentrated
on a plan never changed, busy gymnastic
climbing of stems after the stipulated
greenfly, tender, translucent, slow-motion prey.
Programmed to pause only for the awkward lift
of the wing-cases ready for flight away,
hang-glider style. Shits a smelly yellow gift
in defence. They say beetles outnumber us,
but they're bound to respond to a stimulus.
MOSQUITO
'Knock, knock!' 'Who's there?' 'Amos.' 'Amos who' 'A mos-
quito.' A joker surprises you. He stings
unexpectedly. Thought there could be no loss,
pain, disappointment. What's harmful in a name?
but that warmth, like emotion, blind, is what brings
insect prospectors on self-correcting aim,
with their jewellers' lenses, and their elbowed,
probing inspection. Your very pulse, unknown,
is the point of your weakness. Some life is owed,
deep in the red. Not till after he has flown,
do you see that your heat was the cheat. A new
itching meaning's emerged in that '-quito' clue.
CANADA GOOSE
There's one Canada goose on the Cam, all year
single. Consorts with swans, accepting the scraps
just as readily. Homely brown by their sheer
iceberg pride; clerical-collared. A solitary
honk occasionally that we hear perhaps
over the beeps of the traffic, novelty
after quacks and the swans' grunts. Is unaware
any exist of its kind. Go twenty miles
to the Hundred-Foot Washes and you'll find there
hundreds, whose clamour drowns traffic. This exile's
calm inwinds in the mind, for not even 'cope'
is the word for it, knowing not even hope.
BLACK SWANS
On the Lever Park Pond behind railings were
black swans. They sailed around, stood on one leg, preened
their wing feathers wobbling their beaks, would stir
mud in the water for grubs — just like real swans,
and their sidelong eyes, staring back, showed they queened
round the enclosure, like noble galleons,
so it seemed they were proof of the soap lord's
right to nobility, fenced off from the likes
of us ordinary folk, as if they were wards,
lawfully cherished. Under Rivington Pike's
high protection were living safe from attack,
never letting it show they knew they were black.
HEDGEHOG
In a brush there are eyes. Head like a snow-plough,
sharp as the bow of a dreadnought. But the spines —
they're a battle inlocked, with spears anyhow,
splashings of hot steel solidified to horn,
creeping tussocks of rush, forks with crushed tines,
coconut matting, tight-woven out of thorn,
a land-urchin that globes itself in defence,
chestnut-spiked. Chance made it roll on snakes and wait
till they died. It knows nothing of its pretence
as an inanimate ball, but should its fate
be a badger or fox —they know how to prise
open nuts of this nature — it then dies.
BUMBLEBEE
It's the boyar of bees, or the furred Zulu,
assegais brandished. So fat it hangs from wings
where the buzz has to lodge it in air, to view
flowers: they seem to shift in front of it like
a book fiche in a library. This one swings,
wholly ignoring the motion, on the spike
of a lupin, a miniature chimpanzee.
One time in winter, I saw in the garden
one that crawled with the slowness of cold to flee
cold, but got nowhere. I gave the veteran
a god's bounty in honey. It sucked it well.
Paradisal discovery in a hell.
TADPOLES
There were eyes in the pond, clear tapioca.
Knew that the black full-stops lived. Some had squirmed to
commas, question-marks, U's, I's. Saw them closer
back at home held in a jar, with the water
that was brighter than air. Just like you they grew,
wriggling their own way like a son or daughter,
heading opposite directions for what they
wanted, ignoring the others. Their parents
were not there to protect them, for every day
one would be dead, grey, upside-down. Some were giants,
and grew legs exact to the tiniest toe.
Never knew when it was we should let them go.
SWALLOWS
Through the air before wind can deflect them, they've
arc-ed back to where they began, scattering their
busy twitters like twinklings, skimming to shave
over the river, dipping to drink. Cross-bows,
sickles, boomerangs, bank and loop with the flair
better than ace, snatching gnats. Virtuosos
of the violin flight, aspiring to space
high in the twilight, spinning their worlds below
them like skirts. Human vision cannot efface
where they have been, spiral zero on zero
to the past in invisible time, rhythm
of the world that at last brings them to autumn.
CAMEL
It's an ignorant look, the European —
reindeer or camel, elephant or llama,
so this camel's disdain is Arabian
aristocratic. Jabberwocky goggle
on a U-bend neck, yes, old hive as hump, lever,
sinew and hide for its legs, and a joggle,
seesaw and sway for a walk, flabby whiskered
lips like a hare's — but those senile tufts filter
when it's drinking, the soles of its feet rubbered
safe against heat, water is stored. The wiser
check the teeth for its age, see the strength in curves.
What's grotesque is part-blindness in who observes.
DONKEY
Horse as soft toy. Dickensian orphan in
rags with a beggar's patience, its eyes beyond
disappointment, appeal, and, were it to win
sympathy, couldn't be grateful. So often
standing utterly still, held hard in some bond
exile's exacting, and rest cannot soften.
A pack animal — overloaded, an ant.
Ears become cuckoo-pint foolery, no doubt
with exceptional hearing, yet it gives scant
time to its cry, some tripped hiccup, some umlaut
hawk and sneeze. Never bore a god as its prize.
At least Shakespeare repeated 'the fool is wise.'
DOLPHINS
Like a passenger jet, smoothed by the swimming;
playing the gymnast in weaving waves through waves
with itself as the shuttle; inhabiting
wild liminality between bright and dim;
seeing surface as struggle between concaves
and twinned convexes, both air and water's rim
slipped through opposite ways in new successions,
bubble and spray in the other element
as a relished escape. Their transgressions,
flight from a surge, plunge into exuberant
search for fish, one without bound, one holding breath,
give them glee in the game between life and death.
TWO SORTS OF ANEMONE
In the spring woods these yellow asterisks dab
startling reminders. In the seashore pool these
sea-anemones loll, trap the tiny crab,
their worm-tongued, probing stars shrinking to wine-gums
at a touch. Both are rayed, the anemones,
these the wind-flowers, these venomed chrysanthemums,
both are striking in colour, both small, both curl,
wave with the current that flows with warmth and cold,
both are living, both die. See, both can unfurl,
opening like hands from a fist, both can be gold —
Can pursue more criteria, should you wish,
and with pathos recall the death of fish.
RAVEN
An inspection from somewhere. The young raven
perched like a revenant out of Poe blackly
on a stone, very close. So were we craven
not to disturb it, or, ornithologists
for the nonce, were observing with the duty
science requires? Made us jump, this Calvinist
curate, vampire-wing-heaving onto our car,
quizzical Voltaire, beak like an umbrella spike.
The inquisitive eyes of some registrar
noting the detail without like or dislike.
With the Human and Rat shares a quality —
evolution rewards curiosity.
PEWITS
Marking space round the human being, pewits
warn with their name that is not a name but their
warning cry that is not a warning cry, it's
sound they don't call, except as a call that time
has inbred out of chance. It becomes the air,
heather and water, as they zigzag and climb,
stirred in the bowl of the coomb, human
presence as relevant only as danger
to the nest, interruption phenomenon,
signalled without knowledge of sign, to change
course of action. And we look as we think fit
as these fellow-creatures go 'Pe-wit! Pe-wit!'
OWL
Lord Chief Justice, his perch the Bench, spectacled.
Victims invisible. He's wearing ermine;
on his talons a gavel-gleam. A fabled
Beak. And then justice is hovering over
us, aware in the dark, keeping discipline
cowering close. Like a vengeful Jehovah
winged on high, a huge moth with hooks, ready to
swoop to the guilty with death. The young are white
rival acolytes, rending and tearing new
corpses four times an hour. His head a searchlight
on the swivel that misses nothing, fulcrum
of the truth. Should not be the bird of wisdom.
GOAT
Has the Masai's white stripes on its face. Pupils
vertical, making its look inscrutable
but intent — at a touch attacking. Nostrils
fidgeting. Teeth angled for nipping. Satyr
horns for satyrs on innocent animal.
Pinnacle scout, sure-footed. Head that will batter
with the body behind it. Herds loyally,
losing no independence. The billygoat
smells like cheese in the spring, and we vulgarly
troped with the horns and that clue, made it connote
supposedly diabolical libidos.
(and for angels' wings, we equally suppose).
PEACOCK
In the brain of the peacock hen is wonder,
discriminations of gildings, crystalline
lacquers, halcyon cyans, fernings under
watermark flashings, electron auroras
in a rush from a sunrise, rich Byzantine
icons of eyes, or impossible floras
bearing petals of feather, fraying fringes
silkenly fainter in air, twitched like the fan
of a donna, all spread up on prompt hinges
to the imperious stimulus. It's bizarre
this irrelevant show — How lucky we are!
RAT
Stinking scavenger, haunter of the sewer,
cellar and waste heap, scatterer of its own
dung, that swarms in its millions there under
cities world-wide like maggots or lice, merging
with the liminal — peelings, litter, skin, bone,
urine and gristle, excreta and rotting
tea leaves, hair and the menstrual blood, dandruff,
vomit and spit — that you inhabit the place
where selves end and begin, what we would slough
off and forget if we could — it makes you base
and repulsive. Invaded or drained, brother
man must hate you as metonym, metaphor.
MOTH
Furry wigwam collapsed into lichened-bark
camouflage, turning to tree. Has greenlit beads
for its eyes, as it sidles out of the dark.
Vertical take-offs at the window again
and again. See the wings made of suedes and tweeds,
body a bear, watch-spring proboscis, a hen
as a head. It flies round like a model plane,
but it is stroking the air into silence.
But what automatisms strictly constrain
it so to immolate itself? what patience
to persist to a climax so disciplined.
Isn't it lucky that we're not determined!
WORM
Limp pink penis, of course, so castration fears
tinge what your digging turns up, halves unable
to escape from the agony — it appears
so to the human eye — perhaps it's no more
than a program's dysfunction. Can't disable,
though, your unconscious responses — to ignore
what you're knowing — that program's on your hard disc.
All the worm mucous membrane, wincing helpless
in exposure, preferring the earth's no-risk
pressured enclosure, flexibly ringed, sinuous
peristalsis in tunnels forcing life-space.
See it dead on the path, a dried brown shoe-lace.
BULL
Like a coachman's its shoulders, with pelted muscle.
Forehead and eyes are a boxer's, suspicious.
On the monolith neck, thicker folds rumple,
storing the force that waves in the horn welded
to the weight-stubborn skull. Blowing stertorous
breath in a double trumpet. Docile gelded,
but here hoards its packed scrotum like a mammoth
tooth. Four-square legs prod equilibrium
solid. Symbol to lead a witches' sabbath,
mark of incarnate machismo, maximum
male. Survival of quintessence divinest? —
Just a sign of the farmer's disinterest.
LIZARD
It makes models of self, light, plastic, rigid,
just so that no one takes notice. You could pick
it up — all the true-life pose, just where the id
placed the last finger and the cock of the head
and the curl of the tail, so sharp you could prick
your moving finger, now as if never dead
because never alive, perfect to observe,
joining the background of shadow and crevice,
all erased into nature, locked by a nerve
tripped by a past authority, artifice
of inanimate blank, absent appetite,
so the animate life can flick out of sight.
CAT
And just what kind of wave is a cat? It flows
paddingly slung, furrily loping, to steal
in detachment, with eyes that open and close
vertical slit, lid horizontal. Attack
automatic its mode, for play or for real,
dipping down, tail twitching, to watch, maniac
in the passion to leap. Then curls itself to
sleep, turning athlete to cushion, that can hide
the sprung trap of spread claws. Can pretend the true:
instinct in mock size as it's hopping aside
with its fur up on end, or choice — with a yawn,
see it rend the hand's belly with claws indrawn.
DOG
And a dog? Watch it weave right and left, and then
hold to the smell, a historian, perhaps
lifting leg for the future. It's off again,
with its legs keeping out of step precisely,
with its hair shrugging with them, and the tossed flaps
ears will allow if not alert. Caninely
seeking self in its own tail or another
dog's, or in two-footed sprints after desire,
be it food or mate, or, chased as other,
thrown ball or stick. The bark, to terrify a
would-be enemy, scores like a jagged tin,
or the tail swings its waves your regard to win.
COW
It is propped at four corners, hammock-body
lodged in between them. Frog-eyed, with a bell-like head.
One is watched in a heavy, melancholy
turn from the neck, a mechanical-digger's-
shovel swing. In the mud see its peg-toed tread
rearrange puddles. Some bovine concern triggers
its hoarse voice, both a contrabassoon and horn,
effortful yearning. Its tail choreographs
flies. White-eyed, reaches over the hawthorn
tearing the better leaf. They stalk like giraffes,
heavy-laden with milk-udder crock. Their death
is forgotten in pastoral-scented breath.
HORSE
It goes galloping thuddingly through the years.
Quadrupedante putrem sonitu marks
an old exhilaration of speed when fears
were put behind by a biped animal
(say, a girl with a foal, that the patriarchs
copied). It crops musingly. By turns wistful,
artful, masterful, borrowing chivalry's
dignity, lending it (ideology
in a curve on a chessman). Our fantasies
blend it with man, persisting mythology
turning up in the advert, the bestseller,
poem, symphony, storied in the teller.
PIG
It's an unshaven snuffler, white-eyebrowed pig.
Suspicious 'Humph!' Splay-footed, the toes twitching
to balletic fastidiousness from the dig.
Nose as a limb. Gnome ears. Body humped as bean,
that it rubs against bars to ease an itching.
Tail as derisory fat tendril. Obscene
in its bloat human nakedness, but noble,
solid, expansive to pigs. Indian goddess
with her multiple dugs, ignoring struggle.
Piglets like scampering hands. Sincere slyness
in their eyes. Their jaws dangerous. Would be banned
from 'The Three Little Pigs' and that 'Pigling Bland'.
RABBIT
Feel the bones moving looser inside them than a
cat's. The long ears help the long back legs, that spring
back, then into the fur ball in the manner
penknives enact. The nose dithers over teeth.
Nineteen-twenties moustache. The eyeballs bulging,
eyes of kitsch-pictured kiddies. A sandy heath
or a hedgerow is mazed with veins for safety,
chance shell or earth carapace, adaptively
so adapted through millions of years. Silent,
save when in pain. Timid-tuned to hesitant,
restless wariness. One type of endurance,
that persists in its own life by avoidance.
SHEEP
See the faces of Anthony Blunt, Edith
Evans and George Arliss. They're QC's. Though prim,
they're inquisitive. Each a still monolith,
showing an Easter Island profile. Movement
raises eyebrows, like startled Alastair Sim.
Ewes graze while lambs shake lei, nosing urgent
satisfaction. Their cry a slowed-down record
just of the French word mais, for the game they play
is 'Yes, but...' Legs like cigarettes, with broad
backs. Self-absorbed undisturbed, in a herd they
flow like leaves on a stream. And when they are shorn,
they ignore their own gawkiness, free of scorn.
POULTRY
They are expert in pausing, like pianists,
fingers at hover over the keys. Scratching
is most businesslike, beak exact. They're stylists
in their walk, with heads angled in arrogant
quest of grist and of seed. Denied their hatching
with every breakfast. The cocks are flamboyant
major-domos with mohican crests. Lady
Bracknells affronted in their look. Their murmur
becomes creakily long, held in a crazy
trance of suspicion; their tut-tutting fervour
can erupt into flutter around the coop.
No mistaking the savour of chicken soup.
GOLDFISH
The lugubrious mouth. The eyes like metal
washers. The twiddling fans. The wire-netting scales.
It's a flexuous zeppelin, red petal,
gliding through gravity, so smoothly sustained
as it parts and it closes water. The tail's
waves become straightforward motion. They're constrained
to this passing each other, telling nothing,
silent as waiters, of where they have just been
so devotedly searching. To our viewing,
holographs in a Victorian stage scene,
they parade in inane, elegant languor,
vision's muzak, or a live, endless screen-saver.
FLY
It's a butcher who's sharpening knives; then it's
resting on fingers like a deferential
shop-assistant. It moves in zigzagging fits,
padding a Flymo over glass. Its brown eyes
are of Buckminster pomegranate, swivel-
set, and they pixel the world. Wears no disguise
save a waistcoat, a valet's, Victorian
debutante's waist, and wings like a bridal veil.
celled like flesh of an orange. Its abdomen
armoured with plate, each a watch-strap's metal scale.
But see automatism climbing the pane
as it whirs to its nerves again and again.
WASP
See it choosing its flight, tentative, checking
scent, but alert for whatever could oppose.
Even there on the plate, prompt at repressing
pleasure, it rises in vertical take-off
from the task of the sweet, as if it forgoes
nothing, aware that the best is to make off,
that that route to the sweet is the shortest, in
spite of the seeming proximity. Kant would
have approved. See as well as the discipline,
martinet's uniform. Fascist sisterhood,
each a tail with a venomous thorn supplied.
Kill it quick as it writhes from insecticide.
SPARROWS
How impatient the sparrows! Checking every
angle for danger — a proof of the long past
with its deaths of the careless; only fussy,
restless on-movers survive, attending man
for his grain and his crops; wherever he cast
them, they went straight to the place. Quarrelsome clan,
their hostilities vulgarly set a bush
shrieking with leaves, but a cat takes advantage.
It's an arrogant midget, aiming to push
rivals from air. It hops through the foliage
tracing triangles, 3-D. Will couple there
in full view, disregarding human taboo.
FROG
It's the Little Green Man of the SF books.
Eyes like a robot's, and tongue like a robot's,
for it shoots at a dot, not a fly. It looks
out of the water, twin periscope-bubbles.
It's become its green background, the stripes and blots
that long prehistory's stamped against vigils
of heron and pike. A leaper on land,
fingering grass, in the water a thruster
with an umbrella pump. A pale and moist gland,
throat with its delicate throb. We can't fluster
its cool reptile tranquillity. Analogue
for what human responses when frog meets frog?
TERRAPINS
White, green, handsome grotesquerie, faster than
tortoise. It scrabbles for air like somebody
drowning, but it is not. Penis head that can
snap at your finger. Half of a walnut
for a body, a Juggernaut with horny
legs that are crooked like leaf-rakes. In haste they butt
into glass or the stones or each other, in
search for escape or revenge, ignoring all
in the same search, with you as the aim. No chin,
ears, no expression. Out of the tank they crawl
on their tiptoes, a Citroën lift. No route
to a tropical river for this pursuit.
CICADAS
The cicadas in this tree could almost be
echoes to those in that one. No sooner do
two of them get in phase, your ear is left free
choice of some other as echo, their squawking
so mechanically matches. Which one is new,
which is the same — there's no understanding
such a clockworking squawk, computerized talk,
aeon-adjusted for selecting a mate.
Hear desire at its finest in that quick squawk,
almost a quack, so perfectly tuned, it's fate
for cicadas. Who could be more emphatic
when a word has become s automatic?
ROOKS' RITUAL
In the elms down Vale Avenue, an ancient
rookery, huge and perennial. Before
days of gun and fertilizer, fervent
families gathered in hundreds, garrulous
as an unruly senate. High branches
bore nests like bouquets of black flowers. So populous
over centuries, they would perform annual
ceremonies, perhaps to fix the landscape
in the brain, all-unknowing. In a ritual
flight in late summer, they all soared in the shape
of a spiral, higher, a black galaxy,
and swept round until sunset in majesty.
SHADOWS OF SEAGULLS
Up the wall go the shadows of seagulls, black
flittering ghosts, that are flapping from nothing
at one edge into sudden existence and then back,
quite as unnervingly, into empty sky.
All the energy's there, the pressured rushing
on to the end, all the craft with which they fly,
the aspiring, the gliding, the wrist-wrestling
with winds, but they also do cleverer things:
can distort to a window's shape, there sloughing
off all the grime of the bricks with spectral wings.
They have gone now. The sun is bare on the wall,
as if they had not flown across it at all.
THRUSH
There's a coloratura thrush. I suppose
that the Italian, not knowing about
synaesthesia, worded those sopranos
quite as spontaneously. Iridescence
makes a shimmer as gorgeous. The gadabout
melody visits notes with a transience
that the memory hardly captures, like these
hues in the bubble, flicking quicker than trout
through baroque aureoles, madder vortices,
flexuous amethysts. I could almost doubt
it was sound I was hearing, or, if sound, the twirl
of the tune turns the voice to that of a girl.
SPOOR
There are tracks in the snow. Some mini-tridents
make a long necklace where a living bird came
to the place it had been; others at tangents
mark an inspection, a taking-off. These could
be nasturtiums (a swan): you see how its aim
shifted (or the wind blew it sidelong). A cat stood
here and then leapt, and the distance codes emotion
(appetite, fear). A dog has wandered, nosing:
little Mickey-Mice mark each foot's devotion.
See our own boots where we set out this morning.
We were leaving a sign there back in the past
of just where we'd decided to go at last.
INVISIBLE WAVES
Watch the tips of that rook's wings. It only feels
risings and fallings as it flies. A sparrow,
as it dashes across, unaware unreels
to a registering eye an invisible
instant wand like a larch frond, or an arrow
feathered with waves along all its length. Waggle
goes the tail of that duck, as in ignorant
loops drawn on no paper horizontally
by a quill in the fingers of an infant.
See the swell in that heron's flight, gradually
lifting pride beyond pride: he'd be a god, save
for his failure to know it's made by a wave.
PREMATURE DAWN CHORUS
No, you mustn't upset a circadian
rhythm. The time, for example, when I played
a recording I'd made to my avian
neighbours. At three one morning, a loudspeaker
on the roof, with my tape-recorder I'd laid
wires and a plot. Unprecedented trickster,
on the morning before I had taped the Dawn
Chorus from earliest twitter to climax,
at the time of four. At three, switched on my horn.
Premature replay. Soon whistles, caws and quacks,
trilling thrushes, cooing doves woke the chorister
in each bird in Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
GULLS IN THE GALE
On the weather-charts great vortices, and here
wind blows horizon to horizon. The gulls
are now kites without cords, the whole atmosphere
felt in their feathers, fluttering with the air
and against it, or swaying through it as sculls
shooting a skiff. Rising with a debonair
shrug, they arc down the wind, at one with it all.
Thus for a moment see the wind (which they must
feel as still (must see land in careering fall);
then with a snap (a thumb and finger), the gust
is thrust jostling aside. Once again upswirled,
they fight strength in the sun and the turning world.
JELLYFISH
Looking down from the Fleetwood boat. Jellyfish
looming like eyeballs up and down. Feathering
themselves, gulping the water, a twitch and a swish,
skirts indrawn, splurged outwards, hardly more than clear
water-domes. How they shift sidelong, tethering
body to wave, disturbing their hemisphere
at the humour of pressures, relaxations
brought from elsewhere. Something so delicately
and complacently yielding to pulsations
cannot be injured, lolls dispassionately,
purple-irised in languor. One envies them.
They lie dead on the beach like a gout of phlegm.
ASSERTING THE HIERARCHY
With a prow like a swollen barge, the male swan,
herding them all, thrusts out a ruffle of waves
like some Tudor grandee. Cowed, in echelon,
young males and females hurry in front, a proof
of their place, for their going nowhere as slaves
marks out their master's direction. He, aloof,
rests his neck in himself like an arrow drawn,
pummeling water in muscular surges,
with his wings like a helmet, driving in scorn
those whose desires must acknowledge his urges
or authority or each a mockery
of the other, by nature's necessity.
SEAGULLS IN THE PLAYGROUND
Every day come the seagulls to the playground
scavenging scraps. They wing above shrieks and games,
shouting, chasing; they're fixed in search round and round,
black eyes alert for the space. When chance gives it,
automatic their swoops, absolute their aims;
wingbeats once regular now collapse and split
into chaotic accuracy after
sandwich and scrap. They screech like cats, make exact
choice between snatching food, expressing anger,
judging the distance of human threat. Children
run at will, scare them off, but nothing suspect.
See how two purposes cross and never connect.
HOVERFLIES
By the clematis, hoverflies. They seem to
move the whole world around themselves as centre,
all their shifts are so fast. Wings of blur-tissue
tied in bow-ties. When they settle, they were still
before settling. Each one precise measurer,
level to level, of petal and tendril,
scrutinizing like helicopters with their
big shiny eyes. Strictly detached, they ignore
every other, alert to find in the air
source of the ecstatic scent, programmed to oar
till they drop never losing their buoyancy,
disappointed in perfect expectancy.
CATERPILLARS
Caterpillars use waves to walk. See the hunch
slide to the back, and the soft upholstering
extend further the goggling head. See these bunch
feet at the front and hump a high loop forward
in a sensitive palpitation to cling
sucker-like, heaving its lightness in leisured
limp succession. The fur of this one angles
waves down its length like knitting needles, bagpipes
in a bristling glissando. This one dangles
free on a wet silk filament sunlight wipes
up and down as it spins. These models can tell
in their slowness of faster waves in the cell.
ANIMAL GAIT
When a dog trots, there's the legs of two little
men out of step. With a rabbit they remind
one of skiers. A flamingo can twiddle
knees into angle-poise; hens scrat in the dust
with one leg and step backwards, hoping to find
something that triggered their ancestors and must
therefore satisfy them. Portly carrion crows
swagger parsonical. Tigers lope their svelte
weight on furred lumber. Tower of giraffe flows
sidelong on tall fingers. Under rolled-up pelt
grizzlies play at gloved puppets, which they smother.
Yet they all put one leg after the other.
SEAGULLS AND WAVES
Said, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?
But you could say, if spring comes, can winter be?
All these in-circling gulls, to rules of their kind,
tracing out day on common, playground, water,
in search, roost, squabble, fly now in perigee
tracing the year, in apogee next summer
on the coast by their nests — how many return
next time the Earth tilts this way? Each sure wing-beat
flaps the metaphor, dip and lift a stern
omen of day and year and years, of retreat
and advance, of repletion and hunger, breath
after breath, strife and tenderness, life and death.
SWANS
Swans are yachts with a periscope mast. The eyes,
black with mascara, always staring sidelong,
have a Genghis-Khan look, set to ostracize
anyone. Beaks have the colour of bananas
and the styling of racing-cars. See their strong
paddles of black leather thrust twin cupolas
of meringue forward rocking, and their tails tip
down with the stroke, fat points like hyacinth shoots.
If the wind coarsely tousles feathers, these flip
back into smooth correct place. Bird absolutes,
haughty models of taste that take us aback
(though a colonist found that they could be black).
MINNOWS: 'IF YOU BUT SCANTILY HOLD OUT THE HAND...'
Like iron-filings the minnows are rearranged,
still to each other though the water's flowing.
If your passing disturbs them, the screen is changed
fast as a film-cut, and they are over there
as intent as before. Now they are going
somewhere important, converging darts in air
on a target, they hardly dither their tails,
but they go sleeking unhindered, each a flick
underneath that's a leaping shadow that scales
stones, traces hollows with electric
faultless delicacy. Escaping all hurt,
to invisible currents always alert.
STARTLED SEAGULLS
Startled seagulls against the darkening common
all getting larger, white astonished eyebrows,
near a hundred, a stampede in air, risen
Boeing 747 in breadth, giant willow-leaves
in slow out-of-phase flutter, heads like pierrots,
tails like grey axe-heads. But then the flock upheaves
all as one — and these whites all turn black, the sky
now their background, and are gliding crosses,
like a volley of Dark Age missiles awry,
for they're diverging leaves that a weir tosses
apart; flowing in crescent currents they pass
swiftly back to their prim to-and-fro walk on grass.
DUCKLINGS
For the ducklings the mother-duck is a kite —
they are the tail, looping, shrinking, extending.
So identical they are shuffled to sight
just like the back of the cards. Then the mother
pauses. All her magnetic command ending,
ducklings now swing like compass needles, hunger
now the moving desire. They're the yellow and
brown of a spotted apple, feel like a purse
made of fur with some change inside. Over land
waddling like little fat people, they traverse
in a steadfast file, never ever steadfast,
their brief present protected by a long past.
BIRD ON A BRANCH
Now a starling alights on a twig of birch.
Wind, blowing strong, sets bird and twig swinging hard.
A chaotic attractor, forcing a lurch
this way and that, up and down. The bird corrects
with its own dip and swing, in time, never jarred.
Watching the world at all points, it neglects
where it is, leaving balance to robot nerve,
grip, semicircular canals, whatever
of organic machinery judges curve,
weight and gravity. Thrusts off with a clever
leap it knows nothing of, twig left in scorn
to record with its wave the bird it has borne.
WAVE WITHIN WAVE
Take the flight of this sparrow: three rapid beats --
What could be better waves than its wings? -- flapping,
winning lift and momentum from springy pleats
stitched in responsive air. But there's a longer
wave of rhythm: when these three are done, snapping
close with its wings, it bullets with a stronger
and more confident aim, over forty feet,
curving so slightly to earth before snatching
back to flapping again. It's still not complete:
trace in its flights themselves rhythms of catching,
feeding, searching; in days, nights, all life's stages,
generations of life throughout the ages.
ANGRY SWAN
The swan's pride sounds like spite when it hisses. This
dowager distance gapes with the beak; a queen
in a coach, pulling out her tongue. Feathers kiss,
arched like two comets together, figuring
death of monarchs, or triumphs; crescents of sheen
slip down the neck, across breast; there, hachuring
shadow slides over ermine. Aristocratic
buoyancy, sovereignly smooth progress, whitest
grandeur, holy remoteness, operatic
arrogance -- all, with none of the politest
of responses, evaporate when it's vexed.
Not a symbol but must submit to the text.
DUCKS
Here are ducks with their tugboat impudence by
swans. Water never comes near them. Watch it flash
off their feathers like mercury. They defy
it, dipping deep for a flea-shake, bouncing
on its waves, water-ski with their feet splayed in splash-
landings, in fights flattening it backwards, flouncing
with their wings outspread round each other, and beaks
tweaking necks under. A flotilla scrawls V's
upon V's over it, through duckweed tears streaks
black like the wakes of ice-breakers. As they please,
they're all off it, exploding as to a fuse,
and they cut over clouds like F 42's.
A STILL
In a squirrel, a mouse, a silver-fish, you
see a rapidity skip over hurdles
that will halt without braking to a statue,
so like a film that gets locked, a still, a freezing,
that you look further on to catch its foibles,
as if hurrying on there was the teasing
little spirit, invisible, outlining
very smoothly all awkward edges, body
swiftly following feet, precisely divining
without testing or resting, anything they
neatly match to the touch. But here, instead.
like a petrified word, they pretend to be dead.
DINOSAUR VERTEBRA
It's a dinosaur vertebra, cast in stone,
even to pores and to pads and to remnants
of the core of the spine, a heavier bone,
massed with millennia, topped with a hollow
like a key on a typewriter. All events,
world-wide, have left it untouched, a print, echo
in the rock of a life lit to search, to eat,
flee and approach, a lumbering dignity
in a wordless developing, obsolete
species not knowing its fate. What fatality
put it out? unstrung the limbs' and the spine's
cord — to act as a paperweight on these lines?
WHITE MOUSE
The white mouse. Eyes like tiny cherries. A split
nose always padding the teeth. Whiskers silver
in a miniature pincushion. A St. Vitus fit
quivers the lightest of bodies, as it looks
to the left, to the right, up and down, wriggler
out of the nest of fingers, runner with hooks
up your arm to your shoulder, ignoring place,
person and time in the single search, blind to
all that fails to reveal the one thing, a race
where this competitor will never see you
as another with hunger, in paranoid
haste to flee, to cancel or cram the void.
HONEY BEES
They build Buckminster-Fuller-wise, unconscious
arithmeticians. Communal city, but
with a queen and the drones. They're oblivious
quite what devoted repression it all seems,
rather oppression, all amassing this glut,
honey for humans, so bound to this regime's
inner dicta they're busy without knowing
it — They are humming for nothing, not even
as a passing of time, all this criss-crossing,
fetching and carrying, dancing direction,
tending, isn't obedience, honour or revel.
There's still pleasure and pain down at that level.
BLUEBOTTLE
This blued-steel, stout Hell's Angel turns its throttle
up as it butts at the window. Its armour
Japanese, showing handsome for bluebottle;
cane-cling-film partition wings; its eyes nacelle
for its helmet; a black metal detector
swinging for tongue; on thorax the infidel
cuirass glisters with coffee-cup gilt. It zooms
hectic but voiceless, declaring its presence
with a shock. From what rottenness in what rooms,
nursed in humanity's waste, comes truculence
with such bellicose speed? But how to get peace?
I don't reach for the can: I give it release.
WOLF
Twine-toed bounce of a lope, guided by acute
nose that can scent out the past stirred in present
currents, blending unblended, that constitute
world in a breath, the rabbit close or long lost,
or the other pack's land, plain air redolent
(paper to poem) of weather and of crossed
trails, of droppings and flowers, of a deer's old
age or the youth of the faun, oil in a trap,
shout of bear-fur, a stink-whisper in the mould
where some wolf-bones turn white, irrelevant flap
of a crow moving lazily off in time.
Wolves are sure to sniff out the relevant rhyme.
IMPRISONED BLACK BEARS
Efficacious the Black Bear bile, Chinese doctors
say. So a knotted steel cage of coffin size
binds the bear. It's convenient for the farmers —
danger at minimum, access for needles,
too, at maximum. It's a safe compromise.
Orthodox Jews, foetally hunched, their struggles
never starting. They relish a treat, their tongues
free to escape through the bars — though thankfully
not the jaws or the claws. The urine, the dung's
cleared away promptly. One has gone gradually
mad, its head shifting level-crossing-light-wise,
with some kind of an emptiness in its eyes.
GIRAFFE
Has a slow-motion gallop, twiddling like tongs.
Size changes time. Our inferiority
projects superiority that belongs
not to that head like a deer's with two gear-knobs
and those gasmask eyes, nor to the neck really
body, a parasol-crane with shadow-blobs
as on hot French crepes, nor to the rocking-horse
hooves, nor the legs like suspension-bridge pylons,
but to height and to haughtiness. Can't divorce
numbing authority from these paragons
of distortion, their view supreme in its worth,
so they seem to have no relation to earth.
PENGUINS
A great egg-box of frost, the penguins huddled
close in the hollow, backs to the wind. No way
but a stoical stillness. In spring, shuffled
stiffly to seashore again, clockwork toys that
can run down for the gulls to gut. Fat waiters
stumbling with nothing, aqualung divers that pat
overloaded, with those wings that aren't arms or wings,
sack race of apoplectic parsons, that trip
every step and recover, such clumsy things
can't be called bird. Another self when they slip
into water. It's no longer land's prisoner.
all the failure is favour in this milieu.
OTTERS
They're pursuing pursuit — out of the water
scrabbles the prey and the predator follows
snapping tail without snapping, quick to thwart a
turn into prey and the escape is improved
upon, jumped with a roll. Now the slide swallows
liquorice sucked smooth, where this fooling has grooved
mud to serve for its game, and the predator's
chased under water, somersaulting dolphins —
first a tail, then a wet-cat face, a waltzer,
hoaxer and plotter, never otter, for grins
so grotesque as a threat say "A snap at throats
won't 'denote what a snap normally denotes'."
SALMON
That this hill is of limestone, that of millstone
grit, that the heather and whinberry, sphagnum,
rush and cotton-grass tinct the rain with their own
herbal concoction, and that farm has heifers
and a duck pond, has mixed a single magnum,
wine of a vintage that to salmon tasters
is one river desired. All the failed leapings,
all the successful, arched into freedom's air
over unending freshets, all the swaying
on through the pressure, are to search for one rare
space of water that chance has made of pleasing
and unpleasing, resisting and rewarding.
HAWK
Part of earth as it hovers like that, as still,
save for the tightrope corrections, as this sign
or that hill or the road's tarmac. Evolved skill
purely triangulates while the restless cars
at the roundabout follow volition's line
plunging on through this geometry. A gust mars
the perfection the hawk restores without fuss.
Clouds' navigation star, pinpoint of real
space just there, not so sure of itself, like us,
strictly engaged in search for the ideal,
where its lack is filled by luckless rodent,
its still centre a place to check for movement.
CORMORANT
Supple, wizard-faced, black bagpipe bellows. Perch
watchfully, statue on a plinth. The neck eel,
the head Hoffmannesque clown. Unannounced, a lurch
down to the sea, wriggling out of flight to dive
splashlessly, hidden by wallowing lights that seal
over its hunting. Where is it? With what live
computation are fish snapped by that
hooked yellow beak, secateur-sharp? A water-made
bird, honed through time into cone; for a fiat,
fish triggered eyes, currents knit muscles, winds laid
down the wings, an animate memory,
all its shape and its acts as its history.
SEAL
From above, like a slug, a sausage, lolling
helplessly just where it's hunched itself. Russian
box-doll for head. On heavy crutches limping.
Shawled groups of squatting Indians. Moustache is
an American pioneer's. Coat silken-
stiff or a velvet grown coarse. Societies
interlocked in adaptive behaviours —
timings and spacings, orders and sequences,
hungers, angers, endeavours and demeanours —
mammal decorum warrant for balances
that preserve in their ignorant certainty
all the species of Seal through a century.
CRAB
Armoured personnel-carrier with a wide
lock on the front wheel, a redcoat livery.
It's all elbows and bandy legs, but its pride,
sprung with a snap catch, are the pincers, levered
crane-hoists, boilerplate-axled, strawberry-
pimpled. The eyes are pince-nez, the nose whiskered
with a quick-itching dither. Scissors sideways
shifting its box like a shuttle. A worried-
forehead shape in the shield, heraldic displays
semé with murrey spots. That this one scurried
out of sight saves it now. None of these supplies
can delay its extinction if man's unwise.
GORILLA
Hardly King Kong this heavy, sedentary
eater of plants, 'Déjeuner sur l'herbe' for slow
silent abbots in black, hairy and burly,
spectacled, unamused. The younger ones play
at tig, leapfrog and hide-and-seek, not a blow,
even a hard one, not in fun. Clambering
so-so, lumbering, shouldering with a sway,
all with a massive placidity, loth to
perform anger and hamming it up when they
do. That they beat their breasts in a drum tattoo
is no more than a territory signal.
As a monster it fails to pass the trial.
THE KILLING-TANKS
In the Town's Yard were killing-tanks, about four feet
long and three high, galvanized iron, a glass top,
airtight, as you could see that you'd reached complete
death. Never saw it happen. Enough
to see empty space there inside. Wouldn't stop —
Dogs went on straying, whether friendly or rough,
and then who was to pay for them? Didn't see
as they were being brought in, just heard the whines
and the barks, which weren't there the next day. To be
living next door was all part of life. No signs
of the how or the when. They called it 'snuffing'.
Was a space that was crowded with nothing.
TOAD
With a skin so verrucose you become a
fragment of weathered sandstone. For predators
it's irrelevant background, and the summer
flies will alight within range, you've affected
such a stillness it's motiveless. Such labour's
effortless, almost as if you've objected
yourself, Gautama-wise, grinning in benign
proud impassivity beyond the anxious
and insatiable quests of all the non-bufine,
including us. Hence our easy animus,
our proverbial scorn that misses your art.
There you squat as you wait for us to depart.
PUPPY
It bounds too fast, too eagerly, gets carried
over itself, under, sideways, but cushioned
by its own folded softness, only patted,
nudged, elbowed, thumbed by the world. It shakes its head
altogether too much, for to be chastened,
though the pain be but a twinge, nothing to dread,
is a shock for the trusting. To expect play
only to find the response no fun will turn
any puppy to dog in time. Disobey
is a decision impossible to learn
from the sovereign masters, least, not until
it's a dog that can die obeying your will.
SHEEPDOG
Not quite master and slave. See him hesitate
surely, go off at half-cock so precisely
that the sheep were bemused in the very state
wanted just then. The whistles have a secret
that is keening the vale like a litany
high on a violin, traced through a gamut
where his ears can distinguish, turning body
into interpretation, into ordered
spontaneity. Chance may now travesty
masters' anticipations: what was measured
scampers loose, but the sheepdog, disobeying,
brings sheep back to the fold as if he's playing.
CHAFFINCH SINGING
Heard a scherzo of notes on that May morning,
scissor-assertive, cutting the whole blue air,
marking every near hedge and field with warning
sharper than woollen dove-notes, louder than far
caws from crows, double-knock from pheasant. So where
was the brisk fanfarist, skilful avatar
of an arrogant tiny bird-god? A search
round with binoculars, stereo-guided,
soon revealed a lone chaffinch high on a perch
lifting and sinking with it, his decided
mini-notes thrilling throat and my ears. With peach
chest and corporal's stripes, he proved he could teach.
SPIDER
The disturbed spider drops away from my hand
and the wind lifts him swinging in slow motion.
There's no pendulum arm and nowhere to land.
He just bounces on breaths of air, on forceful
but invisible nothing. With devotion
he clings close in to himself, till in a lull
he relaxes his own long bond just an inch,
but the breeze takes him out much further, reaching
into unknown vertiginous space. His winch
draws him back in a hurry, freedom teaching
him to check himself back to where he began.
My thumb cuts the bond. I lift him where I can.
SWALLOWS
Watch the swallows. Admire them for their own sake!
Sharp as sickles to cut corn, quick as arrows
to kill rivals, or, diving upwards, as fake
would-be angels about the heaven to find
heaven. Sleight-of-wing swindles, evasive mows
and mops, pairs of them criss-crossing, their paths twined
inextricably, headlong power controlled
automatically to move as master
puppeteers twitch their puppets. The sky is scrolled
with their script. What they write seems to run faster
than our wishes, but don't say that it follows
absurdly that these might be divine swallows.
LEAF-INSECT
See this leaf-insect? No? Wait, he will not shift
when the leaves start to move. He has made his blood green
though his heart has turned white. With practice he stiffed
all his limbs into stalks, laid out the cases
of his wings as the leaves instruct. To be seen
for himself is his fear. As leaf he faces
us in fearful audacity, inspecting
with a calmness no other insect could act
all the threat of our nearness, not affecting
to be leaf, but as leaf, as matter-of-fact
as a judge grown into the part. Fear will seize
him when the leaves start to free themselves in the breeze.
STARLING
How that starling can stretch himself and be still
himself! How he articulates his bone-links
as he yodels with joy up there! From his bill
come such mimickings! He finds it fun to be
other. Perky with words not his, he hoodwinks
us with echoes, perhaps our own. He makes free
with all voices, except his own. He becomes
all his models in turn, for his confidence
betters theirs. If he sings, it's bliss: if he drums,
it's hate. Copies are true to an audience
when performers perfect. He won't ask 'Who am
I?' when he's so successful being a sham.
CANARY
On a search with a cage. The door is open
to the whole world. They call, 'Come, pretty Billy!'
Mobbing sparrows ignore them. A simpleton
of a bird it must be that would enter there
for that seed, to be fooled with mirrors, silly
bells like harness, and swings that take you nowhere
for reward that depends on imitation,
or for songs when a cover's removed, and for
stopping when it's put back, as if cessation
of joy or its ejaculation were more
a machine's than a bird's. One must be wary
if one is a fine a bird as a canary.
THRUSH (II)
Hear the thrush scatter sparks, and their echoes flash
into silence. Hear him skilfully twist and snip
of his bows and bright trinkets with such panache
you would think that the silver flame they were made
of would last, that these breezes were not to whip
the right out as they came, his filigree stayed
like the veins of a leaf that's incandescent
in the draught of a fire that never goes out,
that this furnace spun glittering filament
more immortal than the nightingales devout
poets doubted, or older thrushes burning
out despair as a century was turning.
SINGLE SWAN
See a swan like a sergeant-major: peaked cap,
black moustache, an imperious manner, broad
in the chest, stiffened everywhere with a strap
or a bone in the corset, so supported
on the water that it swells of its own accord
forward, nothing there under the distorted
surface forcing it on save its own image.
Like a baton it tucks its head in its wing.
It's a weapon that peak, and a privilege
to be wearing one. Beauty must serve the king
like this. Though it keeps its power in disguise,
we salute the uniform we recognize.
BUTTERFLY (II)
Watch it batter at nothing, the butterfly
at the window, insisting on winging it
upwards when there's an opening to the sky
below. Gilding looks dingy with the effort
of flutter, and its nose must be hurting it.
Peacock eyes cannot frighten nor can scarlet
turn to blood when they're hidden by timorous
flapping. Delicate pinions hammer damage
at the callous glass, fraying to a fibrous
edge themselves. It's so desperately savage
in the gale of desire, you would hardly know
with what grace it can fly when you let it go.
ANTS (II)
Lift the stone off the ants' nest. They will spill like beads,
iron filings, but prickling predictably
as if still on loose strings, for not one impedes
its companions, just as the magnetic force
always swerves into pattern. Catastrophe
automatically has programmed a course
of hysterical coolness. The white larvæ
are now being removed with ideal dispatch
into darkness. Tyranny or destiny
couldn't better obedience, couldn't match
such pernickety fuss. This prompt devotion
can dispense with government and emotion.
ATTACKING SWAN
Saw the swans by the other bank being fed,
cygnets, a female, and, too, a guardian male.
When he saw that our boat was approaching, sped
over to our side, wings cusped outward like shields,
neck withdrawn like a mangonel, in full sail,
armed for attack. Was no question of who yields
way in such a predicament. I guided
us just as near to the bank as I could, far
from his family. But he near collided,
thrust to the back, and with wings like doors ajar,
as a cobra uprose, a fierce autocrat.
Could a terrorist see that he's not like that?
WILD BOAR
Among loose rock and trampled earth the wild boar
prodded and snuffed. Its shaggy pelt had become
brown with mud and accordion-pleated, more
bear than pig; tusks that mock the Kaiser's moustache
and a snout like a pretzel; under glum
eyebrows its eyes precisely ignored us; harsh
mouth champed sideways; its hoofs ranged awkwardly on
rocking stones, shifting its weight like a heavy
sack. A king's quarry, Richard the Third's icon,
there in that open zoo as an unsteady
grotesque hedgehog, sniffing its mate's rear, obscene,
gross and filthy, it preserved a noble mien.
SPARROW SANCTUARY
From the Market Square, Cambridge, you can look in
over the railings of Great St. Mary's Church
into shrubs where the sparrows gather their kin,
resting from scavenging under the shoppers'
feet, round greengrocers' boxes, in their prompt search
picking invisible crumbs, programmed hoppers
that are constantly flitting to where no one
is. At two feet away from your eyes they grip
to the twigs in the green shade, a polygon
3-D distributed, sailors on a ship
on the masts clinging. Here is their sanctuary,
from all predators safe, a free aviary.
LARKSONG
Notice how, when they sing, larks have a base note,
tonic, a resting-place, a treble bourdon
they fall back on, that burrs to a busy rote —
noise of a finger fizzing down dampened glass —
they return to again and again, haven
after the presto melodies, with the grass
far below and the blue to aspire to, space
after melismata on a syllable
that negated, affirmed the transient place
ecstasy never and ever found vowel
to express itself, soothing, still vibration
where the heart can construct a restoration.
TINY FROGS
By a stream sometimes there would be a hundred
little frogs, hopping who knows where. How sedate
they were! Coolly in two senses, they clambered,
equally obstinate, on hand or on ground,
perky-eyed, tiny-fingered, with a scissor-gait,
seeming oblivious of the world around
them, inanimate, animate. Expert at breast-
stroke at the size of a penny, and going
up and down any wave in a certain quest
having no notion of the future, knowing
not a thing of a destination. Active
every instant, such striving was attractive.