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Groom
head combed by my girl
to whom I am an ape
I rain down wool
Poems on the topic: animal
Poems on the topic “animal” on Poets.by.
Thanksgiving Fisher
all around the great dead oak
as darkness falls
a fisher dances
hunting white-footed mice
a dark sine curve
against the snow
that is also somehow able
to freeze for long minutes
crouching pouncing
coming up empty
it is only i sitting across
the frozen pond
who leaves feeling
fuller than before
filled i suppose with seasonally
appropriate gratitude
Unsettler: An Affirmation
i am prey
i am mammal
pure fear
fires my pistons
my eyebrows
can pupate
i have outgrown
my own hair
earth-bound
descended from the trees
i drink from the gray
breasts of clouds
on hind legs
i hone myself
to the thinness
of a blade of grass
Presence
A tree seems like the very embodiment of presence, but this time of year it is mostly absent, at least aboveground. It’s real in the same way that a life-size cardboard cutout of a politician is real. You can project anything onto it. It’s another blank space on your mental map.
sleeping it off
on a park bench
fallen leaves
The Hollow (40)
wood nettles
that angry guy who hacked at them
with his hatchet
becoming the place
of my fisher sighting
foamflower patch
the long moment
after it vanished
fishing for its name
wilder hills
and deeper hollows
the fisher’s undulating gait
Animals and Investment
The Managed Fund
Crows guarded his retirement plan.
They marched around its perimeter.
Squirrels managed the fund.
They wore small green visors,
used their cheeks as briefcases,
embezzled by accident, forgetting
where they buried the dividends.
Fixed Income
One day so dispirited by his work
was he that he decided to retire.
He asked to begin to withdraw
his pension. The account-manager,
a raccoon, presented a box to him,
removed the lid, and waddled away.
The new pensioner peered in.
Humiliation
How nakedly an animal
Lies down on earth to die,
Unmindful of the shining air,
And unashamed of sky.
But men and women under roofs
Draw shades and hush the floor,
And furtively they lay their dead
Behind a darkened door.
Leisure
If I should make no poems any more
There would be rest at least, so let it be;
Time to read books in other tongues and listen
To the long mellow thunder of the sea.
The year will turn for me, I shall delight in
All animals, and some of my own kind,
Sharing with no one but myself the frosty
And half ironic musings of my mind.
Songs of Faith in the Year After Next XIV
The lapidary care bestowed
By God in fashioning the toad;
The expert craftsmanship which He
Spent on the gnu's topography;
The thought which loosened from that Brow
The crab, the camel and the cow,
With equal lavishness He spent
On many a priest and president.
Willie Metcalf
I was Willie Metcalf.
They used to call me “Doctor Meyers,”
Because, they said, I looked like him.
And he was my father, according to Jack McGuire.
I lived in the livery stable,
Sleeping on the floor
Side by side with Roger Baughman’s bulldog,
Or sometimes in a stall.
I could crawl between the legs of the wildest horses
Without getting kicked—we knew each other.
On spring days I tramped through the country
To get the feeling, which I sometimes lost,
That I was not a separate thing from the earth.
I used to lose myself, as if in sleep,
By lying with eyes half-open in the woods.
Sometimes I talked with animals—even toads and snakes—
Describe a feeling — we’ll find a poem
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