Eagle-Eyed Lion Bird Downgraded
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Tag Archives: Animals
Ambrose Variations
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Terrier
The man helped, carried, the
old terrier
down the two steps
and put him down
on the carpet
of the poetry and philosophy
department
where he fell over
and lay on his side,
the old terrier
I became hysterical
but the attendants,
concentrating on noticing
changes in demeanour,
did not remark this
and left me reading
in books of foreign poems
about everyday things
rendered mysterious
by being noted down
and he, the man, set
the old terrier up
right.
March Sunday
This garden hedge can stare me down with ease.
It has more eyes, perhaps a million more
from thrush to spider and on down to spore.
They gaze at me relentlessly and seize
the thoughts that I would concentrate on you.
Each takes a bit and laughs at it until
the birds fly off and spring’s first wasps go still.
I’d write an ode but find I’m laughing too.
Deathless
Here’s this Death’s-head Hawkmoth travelling solo,
high up, slowly. Banking on solar-guided
day flights, tracking lunar beams through the dark in
honeycombed flight dreams.
Up from Egypt, confident to her wingtips,
desert sunsets lighting her port side. Nights flown
on the same course. Gauging the safest glide paths,
dreaming the touchdown.
Fog-bound days logged over the slate-grey sea chop,
sturdy thorax beating down square-rigged breast strokes
till Swiss cantons stand in for whitecaps. Cruises,
pressing up wing loads.
Light rain welcomes flight’s closing leg to refuge:
vespers’ vistas. Death’s-head knows honey beckons:
bulging golden beehives awaiting her drop-in.
Drills down to get some.
Two months’ perfect homing is paid in sugar.
Sweet with fuel needed for last feat: laying
eggs in garden plants’ shade. Each egg grows its own
honeycombed flight dreams.
Reveille
I lie in a tent on a sandbank in the river
and wonder would I hear the water rise.
The otter’s snoring serves as metronome
for the heartbeat pace of words the moonlight limns.
I wake and all realities retreat,
except the one that’s standing watch today.
In the south of France Lucindas lean on trees,
or dance. For me. For joy. Up here the rain
leaches colour from the just-turned falling leaves.
I shall never see MacArthur Park again.
I see a shimmering line, a lifeline or a serpent,
undulating in the inshore moonlit current,
so close by I could touch it if I woke …
Downstream, or up, a church bell counts the hours.
Four chimes. Clouds mass. It is so sudden dark.
A priest of gentle parentage gets shriven,
or knotted, now for naught his pack of genes
that travelled aeons to arrive in him,
cold on his perch, before the furnace door.
Cold breezes stir the tent. Up high: the jet stream.
Clouds thin. They go. The smuttily full moon
invades the damp sand, wakes the snoring otter.
It caught a fish for each of us last evening.
I called mine sushi. The otter ate both heads.
We spoke the way that mammals do cross-species,
before it slept, of whether there’d be weather.
I need deep sleep, a day of dry, a boat,
the fun of congregations without creeds.
The otter wakes. It watches where that snake,
or pliant water plant, hangs in the current.
We fantasise together it’s a god,
our refuge for describing what’s unknown.
We wish for more fish. I wish for a fire,
and the otter for a thing I do not know.
I shall never see MacArthur Park again
or the reality that has the watch tomorrow.
Beach Busker’s Ballad
Come visit me alone, for one’s enough
that any quorum lacks to vote defeat.
Come visit me in Cadaqués. We’ll hide
out basking on the baking rocks and poach
sweet views of pulchritude.
The octopus,
as sturdy as a horse except no bones,
inks out its living in the open sea,
and I eke mine on land.
It’s marginal,
my living, but, like me, sufficient here.
I catch up passing tourists with my song
and share with them their wine and daily bread.
Unlike the octopus’s prey, mine live
to warn the others, though they never do.
They boast instead they stole away my song.
They sing for years the tunes I have forgot.
I misspeak verbs in languages they learn
in later years, the better to esteem
the wisdom of the octopus we eight
or was it four flushed. Come visit me. We’ll hide.
Squirrel Larder Trek
The squirrel of I Ching, incongruous and slow
(for a squirrel (from the cold)) walks briskly on the snow.
‘A grey squirrel in a snow bank,’ says Lord Flea.
‘If he cannot find his acorns I will freeze.’
Flying foreign sky rats, cold too, coo in pidgin,
‘If he finds his cache, will he let us cage a smidgen?’
The snow crust breaks. The I Ching squirrel chutes through
to his larder stashed with acorns. He eats two.
Earth Tourist 