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by
Ezra Pound
Meditatio
When I carefully consider the curious habits of dogs
I am compelled to conclude
That man is the superior animal.
When I consider the curious habits of man
I confess, my friend, I am puzzled.
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by
Emily Dickinson
The wind drew off
The wind drew off
Like hungry dogs
Defeated of a bone --
Through fissures in
Volcanic cloud
The yellow lightning shone --
The trees held up
Their mangled limbs
Like animals in pain --
When Nature falls upon herself
Beware an Austrian.
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by
Linda Pastan
The New Dog
Into the gravity of my life,
the serious ceremonies
of polish and paper
and pen, has come
this manic animal
whose innocent disruptions
make nonsense
of my old simplicities--
as if I needed him
to prove again that after
all the careful planning,
anything can happen.
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by
Delmore Schwartz
What Is To Be Given
What is to be given,
Is spirit, yet animal,
Colored, like heaven,
Blue, yellow, beautiful.
The blood is checkered by
So many stains and wishes,
Between it and the sky
You could not choose, for riches.
Yet let me now be careful
Not to give too much
To one so shy and fearful
For like a gun is touch.
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by
Robert Bly
At Midocean
All day I loved you in a fever holding on to the tail of the horse.
I overflowed whenever I reached out to touch you.
My hand moved over your body covered
With its dress
Burning rough an animal's hand or foot moving over leaves.
The rainstorm retires clouds open sunlight
sliding over ocean water a thousand miles from land.
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by
Linda Pastan
Wind Chill
The door of winter
is frozen shut,
and like the bodies
of long extinct animals, cars
lie abandoned wherever
the cold road has taken them.
How ceremonious snow is,
with what quiet severity
it turns even death to a formal
arrangement.
Alone at my window, I listen
to the wind,
to the small leaves clicking
in their coffins of ice.
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by
Walt Whitman
Beginning my Studies.
BEGINNING my studies, the first step pleas’d me so much,
The mere fact, consciousness—these forms—the power of motion,
The least insect or animal—the senses—eyesight—love;
The first step, I say, aw’d me and pleas’d me so much,
I have hardly gone, and hardly wish’d to go, any farther,
But stop and loiter all the time, to sing it in extatic songs.
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by
John Burnside
Septuagesima
I dream of the silence
the day before Adam came
to name the animals,
The gold skins newly dropped
from God's bright fingers, still
implicit with the light.
A day like this, perhaps:
a winter whiteness
haunting the creation,
as we are sometimes
haunted by the space
we fill, or by the forms
we might have known
before the names,
beyond the gloss of things.
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by
Judith Skillman
Visage volè l'oiseau
Poem by Anne-Marie Derése
Je ne sais qui tu caches
sous ton visage inventè,
ton visage volè l'oiseau,
emprisonnè de cendre rouge.
Je vais t'aimer comme on meurt.
Je vais te garder
pour les annèes venir.
Tu seras si apprivoisè,
si incroyable,
mon ètrange animal,
avec tes lévres ouverte
sur un sourire perdu.
Je boirai ton haleine
et je saurai qui tu caches.
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by
Louise Gluck
The Garden
The garden admires you.
For your sake it smears itself with green pigment,
The ecstatic reds of the roses,
So that you will come to it with your lovers.
And the willows--
See how it has shaped these green
Tents of silence. Yet
There is still something you need,
Your body so soft, so alive, among the stone animals.
Admit that it is terrible to be like them,
Beyond harm.
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by
Hilaire Belloc
The Frog
Be kind and tender to the Frog,
And do not call him names,
As "Slimy skin," or "Polly-wog,"
Or likewise "Ugly James,"
Or "Gap-a-grin," or "Toad-gone-wrong,"
Or "Bill Bandy-knees":
The Frog is justly sensitive
To epithets like these.
No animal will more repay
A treatment kind and fair;
At least so lonely people say
Who keep a frog (and, by the way,
They are extremely rare).
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by
Hilaire Belloc
Frog, The
Be kind and tender to the Frog,
And do not call him names,
As "Slimy skin," or "Polly-wog,"
Or likewise "Ugly James,"
Or "Gap-a-grin," or "Toad-gone-wrong,"
Or "Bill Bandy-knees":
The Frog is justly sensitive
To epithets like these.
No animal will more repay
A treatment kind and fair;
At least so lonely people say
Who keep a frog (and, by the way,
They are extremely rare).
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by
Ruth Stone
NOT EXPECTING AN ANSWER
This tedious letter to you,
what is one Life to another?
We walk around inside our bags,
sucking it in, spewing it out.
Then the insects, swarms heavier
than all the animals of the world.
Then the flycatchers on the clothesline,
like seiners leaning from Flemish boats
when the seas were roiled with herring.
This long letter in my mind,
calligraphy, feathery asparagus.
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by
Delmore Schwartz
Yeats Died Saturday In France
Yeats died Saturday in France.
Freedom from his animal
Has come at last in alien Nice,
His heart beat separate from his will:
He knows at last the old abyss
Which always faced his staring face.
No ability, no dignity
Can fail him now who trained so long
For the outrage of eternity,
Teaching his heart to beat a song
In which man's strict humanity,
Erect as a soldier, became a tongue.
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by
Judith Skillman
Face Stolen From a Bird
Poem by Anne-Marie Derése, translated by Judith Skillman.
I don't know who you're hiding
behind your mask,
your face stolen from a bird,
imprisoned by red ashes.
I will love you the way one dies.
I will keep you
for years to come,
you will be so tame,
so unbelievable,
my strange animal,
with your lips opening
on a lost smile.
I'll drink your breath
and I'll know who you are hiding.
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by
Jane Kenyon
February: Thinking of Flowers
Now wind torments the field,
turning the white surface back
on itself, back and back on itself,
like an animal licking a wound.
Nothing but white--the air, the light;
only one brown milkweed pod
bobbing in the gully, smallest
brown boat on the immense tide.
A single green sprouting thing
would restore me. . . .
Then think of the tall delphinium,
swaying, or the bee when it comes
to the tongue of the burgundy lily.
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by
Les Murray
To Fly In Just Your Suit
Humans are flown, or fall;
humans can't fly.
We're down with the gravity-stemmers,
rare, thick-boned, often basso.
Most animals above the tides are airborne.
Typically tuned keen, they
throw the ground away with wire feet
and swoop rings round it.
Magpies, listening askance
for their food in and under lawn,
strut so hair-trigger they almost
dangle on earth, out of the air.
Nearly anything can make their
tailcoats break into wings.
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by
Linda Pastan
What We Want
What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names--
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don't remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there
even in full sun.
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by
W S Merwin
Whenever I Go There
Whenever I go there everything is changed
The stamps on the bandages the titles
Of the professors of water
The portrait of Glare the reasons for
The white mourning
In new rocks new insects are sitting
With the lights off
And once more I remember that the beginning
Is broken
No wonder the addresses are torn
To which I make my way eating the silence of animals
Offering snow to the darkness
Today belongs to few and tomorrow to no one
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by
Delmore Schwartz
O Love, Sweet Animal
O Love, dark animal,
With your strangeness go
Like any freak or clown:
Appease tee child in her
Because she is alone
Many years ago
Terrified by a look
Which was not meant for her.
Brush your heavy fur
Against her, long and slow
Stare at her like a book,
Her interests being such
No one can look too much.
Tell her how you know
Nothing can be taken
Which has not been given:
For you time is forgiven:
Informed by hell and heaven
You are not mistaken
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by
James Wright
Fear Is What Quickens Me
1
Many animals that our fathers killed in America
Had quick eyes.
They stared about wildly,
When the moon went dark.
The new moon falls into the freight yards
Of cities in the south,
But the loss of the moon to the dark hands of Chicago
Does not matter to the deer
In this northern field.
2
What is that tall woman doing
There, in the trees?
I can hear rabbits and mourning dovees whispering together
In the dark grass, there
Under the trees.
3
I look about wildly.
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by
Alain Bosquet
No Need
The elephant's trunk
is for picking up pistachios:
no need to bend over.
The giraffe's neck
is for grazing on stars:
no need to fly.
The chameleon's skin,
green, blue, lavender, white,
as it wishes,
is for hiding from ravenous animals:
no need to flee.
The turtle's shell,
is for sleeping inside,
even in winter:
no need for a house.
The poet's poem,
is for saying all of that
and a thousand thousand thousand other things:
no need to understand.
© 2001 translated by F.J. Bergmann
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by
Jerome Rothenberg
I VENT MY WRATH ON ANIMALS
I came alive
when things went
crazy.
I pulled the plug on
the reports of
sturm & drang
When someone
signaled I
left open
what I
could not close.
I broke a
covenant that
was more fierce
than murder.
I vent my wrath
on animals
pretending they will turn
divine.
I open up
rare certainties
that test free will.
I take from animals
a place in which
the taste of death
pours from their mouths
& drowns them.
I support a
lesser surface.
I draw comfort from
the knowledge
of their
being.
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