The Transcendental Friend 14 | 2001-01

[ Physiology ]

[ Bestiary ]

[ Review ]

[ Report ]

[ Nota Bene ]

A Bestiary, Chapter 13—Fair Cats and Cows

I have always admired the odd tidbit, all that is ticklish on the tongue.

—Jebediah McVee

Crayfish is the customary word in Britain for a small lobster-like freshwater crustacean. Americans call them crawfish as well as crayfish, and have also come to use crawfish as a verb = "to retreat from a position, to back out" (he crawfished out of the issue by claiming that he didn't drink). Australians and New Zealanders tend to abbreviate the word to cray (so cray-fishing, cray-pot, etc.). Crayfish is a 16c. alteration of earlier crevis(se) (cf. ModF écrevisse).

Duck. When used collectively it is often unchanged in form (a flock, etc., of duck), but in ordinary plural contexts normally ducks (several ducks came for the bread that we threw into the lake). It is used without the indefinite article as an item of food (we had duck for dinner).

Welsh rabbit. This dish of cheese on toast emerged, with rabbit so spelt, in 1725. (In Mrs. Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery [1747], on the same page, she apparently also called it a Scotch rabbit, but no one seems to have followed suit.) In the same century the lexicographer Francis Grose defined Welsh rabbit in his Classical Dict. of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) as "bread and cheese toasted" and added, "i.e. a Welch rare bit". To this day one encounters people who call the dish Welsh rarebit though there is not evidence of the independent use of rarebit. The origin of the name must remain a mystery: it is not thought to be Welsh in origin, there is not rabbit in it, and neither cheese nor toast is rare. A half-parallel to name is Bombay duck, which was first exported from Bombay, but is dried fish, not a duck.

—Fowler's

* * *

Familiar Proverbs and Portraits
by Dale Smith

Skunks of strong scents
protest the cunning fox.

A yellowish egg, passed through
open guts of a possum,
renders life-view to suburban
SUV owners.

The greed of a grackle thwarts
nervous cardinal chat.

Owls seem wise only for an alien gaze
pushed through human eyes like their own.

A fly distills time
frames to watch flesh
fall against pulpy fruit.

Love doves dine
under mountain laurel
in the squinted watch
of a cunning fox.

Enos orbited earth
despite malfunctioned gears
that approved correct response
with painful shocks;
John Glen got
the tinkertape, the chimp,
banana pellets.

Geckos bask, bellies full of bugs;
their window light wound through leaves.

Spiders weave the unknown
corners, their dying prey
swept up in single stroke
of a broom.

Lizards know the pleasure of our blood
through mosquitoes; owls too know us
beyond thin chameleon skin.

The beetle being
hollowed by ants
moistens the colony
and feeds the ground.

Ground squirrel bitches at
summer strollers whose
bickering bummed him out.

The diplodocus who sucked
water weed and bathed
with abandon in the muck
drives fast to work
pistons in an engine.

Dogs wait patient to sink
teeth in the burden
cattle bear to slaughter.

A man stitched tight
in an ass's hide
falls low to rule
a swollen pride.

The mean raccoon holds
spirit hostage
but the possum drags it out
for all to see.

Redhead woodpecker
pokes a beak in
sweet tree meat.

The anti-social kingdom
of cats ensures strict borders;
humans, acknowledged feeders,
inhabit the margins,
mere staff for stiff
employers.

The deer of defiance
give headlights one dare;
metal and glass crash head
on in the blood-flesh.

Familiars die
so strangers live.