Animal poems
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Ellen West
© Frank Bidart
I love sweets,—
heaven
would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream ...
But my true self
September Notebook: Stories
© Robert Hass
Driving up 80 in the haze, they talked and talked.
(Smoke in the air shimmering from wildfires.)
His story was sad and hers was roiled, troubled.
The Author to His Body on Their Fifteenth Birthday, 29 ii 80
© Howard Nemerov
“There’s never a dull moment in the human body.”
—The Insight Lady
What My House Would Be Like If It Were A Person
© Denise Levertov
This person would be an animal.
This animal would be large, at least as large
A Little Language
© Robert Duncan
I know a little language of my cat, though Dante says
that animals have no need of speech and Nature
abhors the superfluous. My cat is fluent. He
converses when he wants with me. To speak
The Cave Painters
© Eamon Grennan
Holding only a handful of rushlight
they pressed deeper into the dark, at a crouch
The River at Wolf
© Jean Valentine
Coming east we left the animals
pelican beaver osprey muskrat and snake
their hair and skin and feathers
their eyes in the dark: red and green.
Your finger drawing my mouth.
The Cleaving
© Li-Young Lee
He gossips like my grandmother, this man
with my face, and I could stand
I Sing the Body Electric
© Walt Whitman
1
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
Father and Son
© Delmore Schwartz
FRANZ KAFKA
Father:
On these occasions, the feelings surprise,
Spontaneous as rain, and they compel
Explicitness, embarrassed eyes——
Encounter in the Local Pub
© Hugo Williams
Unlike Francis Bacon, we no longer believe in the little patterns we make of the chaos of history.
—Overheard remark
As he looked up from his glass, its quickly melting ice,
into the bisected glowing demonic eyes of the goat,
he sensed that something fundamental had shifted,
from Totem Poem [Abandoned in a field near Yass]
© Luke Davies
Abandoned in a field near Yass a cobwebbed car once kept us warm
and when it rained, though we shivered with sickness,
Blues Chant Hoodoo Revival
© Yusef Komunyakaa
let’s pour the river’s rainbow
into our stone water jars
bad luck isn’t red flowers
crushed under jackboots
Crepuscule with Muriel
© Marilyn Hacker
Instead of a cup of tea, instead of a milk-
silk whelk of a cup, of a cup of nearly six
At the Executed Murderer’s Grave
© James Wright
6
Staring politely, they will not mark my face
From any murderer’s, buried in this place.
Why should they? We are nothing but a man.
from An Explanation of America: A Love of Death
© Robert Pinsky
The child’s heart lightens, tending like a bubble
Towards the currents of the grass and sky,
The pure potential of the clear blank spaces.
