Animals and Nature

His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied, looking for something, something, something. Poor bird, he is obsessed! The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray, mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

Until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go.

Now I adore my life With the Bird, the abiding Leaf, With the Fish, the questing Snail, And the Eye altering all; And I dance with William Blake For love, for Love’s sake.

What I love is near at hand, Always, in earth and air.

When I was a lark, I sang; When I was a worm, I devoured.

And the new plants, still awkward in their soil, The lovely diminutives. I could watch! I could watch! I saw the separateness of all things!

I study the lives on a leaf: the little Sleepers, numb nudgers in cold dimensions, Beetles in caves, newts, stone-deaf fishes, Lice tethered to long limp subterranean weeds, Squirmers in bogs, And bacterial creepers.

Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

The girls are all giggling, then one girl suddenly remembers the wild goat. Up there, on the hilltop, in the woods and rocky ravines, the peasants saw him butting his head against the trees, looking for the nannies. He’s gone wild, and the reason why is this: if you don’t make an animal work, if you keep him only for stud, he likes to hurt, he kills.

Come up with me, American love. Kiss these secret stones with me. The torrential silver of the Urubamba makes the pollen fly to its golden cup. The hollow of the bindweed’s maze, the petrified plant, the inflexible garland, soar above the silence of these mountain coffers.

The trouble with a kitten is THAT Eventually it becomes a CAT.

I think that I shall never see A billboard lovely as a tree. Indeed, unless the billboards fall I’ll never see a tree at all. 1

The turtle lives ’twixt plated decks Which practically conceal its sex. I think it clever of the turtle In such a fix to be so fertile.

Black are the horses. The horseshoes are black. On the dark capes glisten stains of ink and of wax. Their skulls are leaden, which is why they don’t weep. With their patent leather souls they come down the street.

Green, how much I want you green. Green wind. Green branches. The ship upon the sea and the horse in the mountain.

In the parched path I have seen the good lizard (one drop of crocodile) meditating.

Up from the bronze, I saw Water without a flaw Rush to its rest in air, Reach to its rest, and fall.

How strange a thing is death, bringing to his knees, bringing to his antlers The buck in the snow… Life, looking out attentive from the eyes of the doe.

All I could see from where I stood Was three long mountains and a wood.

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable.

The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses Its hints of earlier and other creation: The starfish, the hermit crab, the whale’s backbone; The pools where it offers to our curiosity The more delicate algae and the sea anemone. It tosses up our losses, the torn seine, The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices.

Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity, He’s broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity. His powers of levitation would make a fakir stare, And when you reach the scene of the crime— Macavity’s not there!

The nightingales are singing near The Convent of the Sacred Heart, And sang within the bloody wood When Agamemnon cried aloud, And let their liquid siftings fall To stain the stiff dishonored shroud.

The hippopotamus’s day Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts; God works in a mysterious way— The Church can sleep and feed at once.