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Herodotus (in translation by George Rawlinson) on the hippopotamus: it is a quadupred, cloven-footed, with hoofs like an ox, and a flat nose. It has the mane and tail of a horse, huge tusks which are very conspicuous, and a voice like a horse's neigh. In size it equals the biggest oxen, and its skin is so tough that when dried it is made into javelins.
John Seigneur Bernaud-Chasse (commenting on the above): the animal is but rarely what we make of it.
Emily Dickinson (in a letter?): carefully, carefully...
from The Bestiary
6
There is always something incongruous about seeing an insect
on a paved road. For instance, this bee, determined to walk
to the other side yet unsure of the direction so traveling
in a rough circle as if he were circling something
unapproachable and probably attracted by the heat. By the
gravity of the color black and by the enormity of a road. It
is as wide as it is long and circular in shape and in it he
sees a face that is his own, though it seems so much smaller
when rooted to the ground.
8
I think it is a wren. A sequence of points across a blue
field. Points by definition have no shape. They mark. There
is a constellation nailed in place just behind their
suspended forms. It never gets dark here anymore. And the
compass floats and the angle bends and this is just a small
service they perform while all along they have their own
lives, beautiful lives and delicate, hollow bones.
9
The grey carp hover suspended just below the surface of the
water. Why do we stare at anything alive? We are passersby.
There are five of them. And we stare as though they are not
quite possible, verging on the visible but fading back. The
sky is cloudy today. There are grey clouds in a grey sky
reflected in the grey water. There is no reflection on its
surface, none. Sometimes for moments at a time and they too
are breathing.
Cole Swensen
[Note: Cole Swensen's recently published
Noon
(Sun & Moon 1997), in which "The Bestiary" appears, won
Sun & Moon's 1995 New American Poetry Competition.
Sections 6, 8 & 9 above are reprinted by kind permission
of the author and the publisher.]
from The Animal
Character captured
at the hinge of two destinies
While still unhandseled
When water was precise
Fissure articulate
Limniad eclipsed
You are fit for the shady grove
I stepped into his radius
In the bed of his maelstrom
Carved twelve times
his initials into my stipling side
**
Alas, cried my father
Even as a cow she was lovely
Leaves of trees
were my food
and bitter grasses
I drank from
muddied waters
Instead of
a bed I lay
on ground
not always grassy
I fled from myself
So-ho and back again
**
The whole hundred
Impeccable eyes on guard
In this realm of eyelids
I contemplated the eremetic truth
Littoral
my plotted vigil
Suddenly the light
of his many eyes was quenched
In a single darkness he lay dead
Starry-eyed I traced letters
In the dust
Distant pastures
Camille Guthrie
[Note: "The Animal", from which the above
pieces are taken, is part of a book-length manuscript
entitled, The Master
Thief.]