Animals Poetry

• Sermon of an Elder Catfish
  Watch where youre going, boys-
  Light doesnt dance down here.
  Our eyes grow big as half-dollars,
  But we still cant see a fucking thing.
  Whiskers, lead the way, pull our bellies
  Across the muck we make our beds in,
  Steer us clear of the troubles
  That shake through the world,
  Especially those fast-talking gar,
  Their loose lips and flash of gold teeth.
  We dont want any trouble here-
  Your skins are slick for a reason.
  Depth is the key, gentlemen-if
  They cant find us, they cant catch us.
  I dont care what those heathen trout say:
  The surface is not our home. Heaven
  Isnt above us, the sun on our backs,
  Rainbows bursting from our sides.
  Heaven is deep, its black and cold,
  Its still. Heaven is everywhere
  Everyone else is afraid to go.
  In Animals - 115 days ago
• The Heaven Of Animals
  

  Here they are. The soft eyes open.
  If they have lived in a wood
  It is a wood.
  If they have lived on plains
  It is grass rolling
  Under their feet forever.

  Having no souls, they have come,
  Anyway, beyond their knowing.
  Their instincts wholly bloom
  And they rise.
  The soft eyes open.

  To match them, the landscape flowers,
  Outdoing, desperately
  Outdoing what is required:
  Thr richest wood,
  The deepest field.

  For some of these,
  It could not be the place
  It is, without blood.
  These hunt, as they have done
  But with claws and teeth grown perfect,

  More deadly than they can believe.
  They stalk more silently,
  And crouch on the limbs of trees,
  And their descent
  Upon the bright backs of their prey

  May take years
  In a sovereign floating of joy.
  And those that are hunted
  Know this as their life,
  Their reward: to walk

  Under such trees in full knowledge
  Of what is in glory above them,
  And to feel no fear,
  But acceptance, compliance.
  Fulfilling themselves without pain

  At the cycles center,
  They tremble, they walk
  Under the tree,
  They fall, they are torm,
  They rise, they walk again.

  
  In Animals - 115 days ago
• The Windhover:To Christ Our Lord
  

  I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
    dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
  High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
  In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
    As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend the hurl and gliding
    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
  Stirred for a bird -- the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

  Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
    Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
  Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

    No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
  Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
    Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

  
  In Animals - 115 days ago
• Poem for the Year of the Buffalo
  

  I was born in the year of the buffalo
  A year that brings many troubles
  A buffalo toils all year round
  Works hard but never grumbles

  When i was very small I walked
  With my buffalo to the village fields
  Green grass, high flying kites
  Buffalo and I would daydream

  There was so much wind
  In the wide open fields
  There was so much sun
  Buffalos eyes would brim

  Dont play music near a buffalos ear-
  Please dont tell me that
  If a buffalo looks, a buffalo knows
  It doesnt need to hear

  I left home a long time ago
  But when spring comes I go back
  There I meet the black buffalo
  Still attentive, innocent

  The buffalo eats grass all day
  Spring offers up grass again
  Thanks to heaven for watching over
  The buffalos youth, that never ends.

  
  In Animals - 115 days ago
• Horse
  

  What are you thinking of

  as I pass my fingers

  through your manes coarse wool?

  I take your cheek into my palm,

  you root my coat for food,

  shiver a little. It is cold here,

  in the bare fields, under blank cloud.

  You wander between the stark wire

  bending to eat, running now

  and then. I would do the same

  removed from home and company,

  taking the warmth of a strangers hands

  light and hesitant, like the rain.

  
  In Animals - 115 days ago
• The Sloth
  

  In moving-slow he has no Peer.
  You ask him something in his Ear,
  He thinks about it for a Year;

  And, then, before he says a Word
  There, upside down (unlike a Bird),
  He will assume that you have Heard -

  A most Ex-as-per-at-ing Lug.
  But should you call his manner Smug,
  Hell sigh and give his Branch a Hug;

  Then off again to Sleep he goes,
  Still swaying gently by his Toes,
  And you just know he knows he knows.

  
  In Animals - 115 days ago
• The Great Apes
  

  Sometimes they get so bored we give them treats,
  she says, chained to her cart outside the ape
  enclosure. Peanut better, fruit, and nuts
  stuck on a board for them to pick. We gape
  at her table of ape parts: the elongated skull,
  at cast footprint, the soft hairy hand, the comical
  long-armed shirt a great ape would wear if an ape
  wore shirts. We laugh because theyre so much like us

  or unlike us. Two silverbacks sit on their haunches,
  snapping their fingers, picking their nits, staring
  out from under their meddlesome brows. One launches
  a sudden attack at us, slamming the glass, wearing
  a mask of disinterest. The crowd is interred in mirth.
  We go our merry ways to inherit the earth.

  
  In Animals - 115 days ago
• The Cow in Apple Time
  Something inspires the only cow of late
  To make no more of a wall than an open gate,
  And think no more of wall-builders than fools.
  Her face is flecked with pomace and she drools
  A cider syrup. Having tasted fruit,
  She scorns a pasture withering to the root.
  She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten.
  The windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten.
  She leaves them bitten when she has to fly.
  She bellows on a knoll against the sky.
  Her udder shrivels and the milk goes dry.
  In Animals - 149 days ago
• The Bear
  The bear puts both arms around the tree above her
  And draws it down as if it were a lover
  And its choke cherries lips to kiss good-bye,
  Then lets it snap back upright in the sky.
  Her next step rocks a boulder on the wall
  (She's making her cross-country in the fall).
  Her great weight creaks the barbed-wire in its staples
  As she flings over and off down through the maples,
  Leaving on one wire moth a lock of hair.
  Such is the uncaged progress of the bear.
  The world has room to make a bear feel free;
  The universe seems cramped to you and me.
  Man acts more like the poor bear in a cage
  That all day fights a nervous inward rage
  His mood rejecting all his mind suggests.
  He paces back and forth and never rests
  The me-nail click and shuffle of his feet,
  The telescope at one end of his beat
  And at the other end the microscope,
  Two instruments of nearly equal hope,
  And in conjunction giving quite a spread.
  Or if he rests from scientific tread,
  'Tis only to sit back and sway his head
  Through ninety odd degrees of arc, it seems,
  Between two metaphysical extremes.
  He sits back on his fundamental butt
  With lifted snout and eyes (if any) shut,
  (lie almost looks religious but he's not),
  And back and forth he sways from cheek to cheek,
  At one extreme agreeing with one Greek
  At the other agreeing with another Greek
  Which may be thought, but only so to speak.
  A baggy figure, equally pathetic
  When sedentary and when peripatetic.
  In Animals - 149 days ago
• My Butterfly
  

  Thine emulous fond flowers are dead, too,
  And the daft sun-assaulter, he
  That frighted thee so oft, is fled or dead:
  Save only me
  (Nor is it sad to thee!)
  Save only me
  There is none left to mourn thee in the fields.

  The gray grass is not dappled with the snow;
  Its two banks have not shut upon the river;
  But it is long ago--
  It seems forever--
  Since first I saw thee glance,
  With all the dazzling other ones,
  In airy dalliance,
  Precipitate in love,
  Tossed, tangled, whirled and whirled above,
  Like a limp rose-wreath in a fairy dance.

  When that was, the soft mist
  Of my regret hung not on all the land,
  And I was glad for thee,
  And glad for me, I wist.

  Thou didst not know, who tottered, wandering on high,
  That fate had made thee for the pleasure of the wind,
  With those great careless wings,
  Nor yet did I.

  And there were other things:
  It seemed God let thee flutter from his gentle clasp:
  Then fearful he had let thee win
  Too far beyond him to be gathered in,
  Snatched thee, o'er eager, with ungentle grasp.

  Ah! I remember me
  How once conspiracy was rife
  Against my life--
  The languor of it and the dreaming fond;
  Surging, the grasses dizzied me of thought,
  The breeze three odors brought,
  And a gem-flower waved in a wand!

  Then when I was distraught
  And could not speak,
  Sidelong, full on my cheek,
  What should that reckless zephyr fling
  But the wild touch of thy dye-dusty wing!

  I found that wing broken to-day!
  For thou are dead, I said,
  And the strange birds say.
  I found it with the withered leaves
  Under the eaves.

  
  In Animals - 150 days ago
• Canis Major
  

  The great Overdog
  That heavenly beast
  With a star in one eye
  Gives a leap in the east.

  He dances upright
  All the way to the west
  And never once drops
  On his forefeet to rest.

  I'm a poor underdog,
  But to-night I will bark
  With the great Overdog
  That romps through the dark.

  
  In Animals - 150 days ago