THE TORTOISE IN ETERNITY
Within my house of patterned horn
I sleep in such a bed
As men may keep before they're born
And after they are dead.
Sticks and stones may break their bones,
And words may make them bleed;
There is not one of them who owns
An armour to his need.
Tougher than hide or lozenged bark,
Snow-storm and thunder proof,
And quick with sun, and thick with dark,
Is this my darling roof.
Men's troubled dreams of death and birth
Pulse mother-o'-pearl to black;
I bear the rainbow bubble Earth
Square on my scornful back.
By Elinor Wylie
VARIATION ON A SENTENCE
There are few or no bluish animals. . . .
-Thoreau's Journals, Feb. 21, 1855
Of white and tawny, black as ink,
Yellow, and undefined, and pink,
And piebald, there are droves, I think.
(Buff kine in herd, gray whales in pod,
Brown woodchucks, colored like the sod,
All creatures from the hand of God.)
And many of a hellish hue;
But, for some reason hard to view,
Earth's bluish animals are few.
By Louise Bogan
THE STARFISH
Triangles are commands of God
And independent lie
Outside our brains as wild geese show
Travelling down the sky.
And this five-pointed thing that sucks
Its slow way as it can
Has as sure a hold on God
As great Aldebaran.
It has as large a power to please
Any eye that gazes
Upon its harmony of lines
As ancient Attic vases.
Pentagon for Gawain's shield,
Five points of chivalry,
In ancient laws and musical
It creeps below the sea.
Its fingers are on God's own hand,
Its just name is a star,
Through aeons it remains as right
As birth and dying are.
by Robert P. Tristram Coffin
THE DINOSAUR
Behold the mighty dinosaur
Famous in prehistoric lore,
Not only for his weight and length
But for his intellectual strength.
You will observe by these remains
The creature had two sets of brains--
One on his head (the usual place),
The other at his spinal base.
Thus he could reason "a priori"
As well as a "a posteriori."
No problem bothered him a bit:
He made both head and tail of it.
So wise he was, so wise and solemn
Each thought filled just a spinal column.
If one brain found the pressure strong
It passed a few ideas along;
If something slipped his forward mind
'Twas rescued by the one behind.
And if in error he was caught
He had a saving afterthough,
As he thought twice before he spoke
He had no judgements to revoke;
For he could think without congestion,
Upon both sides of every question.
By Bert Leston Taylor
from THE TRIUMPH OF THE WHALE
Io! Paean! Io! sing
To the finny people's King.
Not a mightier Whale than this
In the vast Atlantic is;
Not a fatter fish than he
Flounders round the polar sea.
See his blubber--at his gills
What a world of drink he swills,
From his trunk, as from a spout,
Which next moment he pours out.
. . . . .
Name or title, what has he?
Is he Regent of the Sea?
From this difficulty free us,
Buffon, Banks, or sage Linnaeus.
With his wondrous attributes
Say, what appellation suits?
By his bulk, and by his size,
By his oily qualities,
This (or else my eyesight fails),
This should be the Prince of Whales.
By Charles Lamb
THE MASKED SHREW
. . . the masked shrew . . .dies of old age after only
a year of fast-paced gluttonous life.--Life.
A penny is heavier than the shrew.
Dim-eyed, and weaker than a worm,
this smallest mammal, cannoned by a
sudden noise,
lies down and dies.
No furnace gluttons fiercer than the shrew,
devouring daily with relentless appetite
four times her inchling body's weight.
More extravagant than the humming-bird's, the
shrew's
heart beats per minute twice four hundred times.
If foodless for six hours, she is dead.
The helpless, hungry, nervous shrew
lives for a year of hurly-burly
and dies intolerably early.
By Isabella Gardner
Deer Hunt
Because the warden is a cousin, my
mountain friends hunt in summer when the deer
cherish each rattler-ridden spring, and I
have waited hours by a pool in fear
that manhood would require I shoot or that
the steady drip of the hill would dull my ear
to a snake whispering near the log I sat
upon, and listened to the yelping cheer
of dogs and men resounding ridge to ridge.
I flinched at every lonely rifle crack,
my knuckles whitening where I gripped the edge
of age and clung, like retching, sinking back,
then gripping once again the monstrous gun-
since I, to be a man, had taken one.
By Judson Jerome
Poem
As the cat
climbed over
the top of
the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot
carefully
then the hind
stepped down
into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot.
By William Carbs Williams
The Crows
I shortcut home between Wade's tipsy shocks,
And lookout crows alert in the bare elm
Ask each other about this form that walks
Stubbled mud they considered their own farm.
They know there's death and loss where such shapes go.
I have no gun--I even feel akin
To these rude, lively birds. But to a crow
Kinship means Crow, and I'm not of his clan.
Off they flap to the woods with a hoarse curse,
And though the landscape's greyer with them gone
I'm glad they're skeptics--someday someone else
Trudging these ruts may raise a sudden gun.
Distrust me, crow!--the not-as-crow-, the other.
Croak, 'Damn your eyes!',and call no man your brother.
By Leah Bodine Drake