'To a Cheetah in the Moscow Zoo'

Furs this expensive you normally only find wrapped around the shoulders
Of gangsters’ molls outside the casino, movements this slinky
Only on the catwalk from the androgynous models,
Eyes dilating in the flashbulbs. As lean as a feline
As Pisanello once painted with a ravished brush
(The fur spotted, whiskery, a golden fleece).
She sashays swishing up and back. Her spine measures out
The least movement.

[triple indent here] To change direction
Millimeters in front of the ditch is something for which
She doesn’t even need eyes. There’s nothing out there
For the ear or the sensitive nose but the noise and sweat
Beyond the wire fence, where those monkeys congregate
With their baby carriages at visiting time. Her breath
Coming hard, she magics the fetor of the metropolis
Into a charmed ozone . . . the white ribbons
In the girls’ hair into strips of gazelle meat. Her fine head,
No bigger than your fist, keeps it alert posture
As she spies zebras in the flickering at the gates of Moscow.
Then she yawns, the prisoner of the cement.

--Durs Grunbein, from The Bedside Book of Beasts (see Jan. 20, 2010)

Powerful poem

Not to waste time about it, here’s one of those occasional excerpts from the PETA guide that was threatened in the last post – an anonymous verse that pretty well sums things up:

Coat with fur,
Hat with feathers,
Lobster broiled alive,
Shoes and bags in sundry leathers
Of animals who’ve died.

Hunted, trapped, and torn apart
For me to satisfy
And, who am I? And what my rank?
That I may live
And they must die?

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Puzzling poem

“The Animals,” a poem by Geoffrey Lehmann, appeared in the June 1 ’09 New Yorker. In free verse, its message is not always, or consistently, clear. In its five “stanzas,” it talks about how we and animals were once the same – “Without understanding we watched the sunrise/ and the coming of night,/ registered the changing of seasons/ and dew on leaves that brushed our flanks.”

The poem includes descriptions of pairs – humans and non-human animals – now living together in homes: “. . .a calf asleep on a double bed, perhaps,/ or a hare with long ears/ crouched under a mahogany sideboard, thumping the floor” and “a neighbor sleeps with a wombat in her bed. . .” .

Before the graphic, sad and surprising (or maybe not) ending stanza, this short one:

“We were once them,
and now are their custodians.
They know we are different
and their eyes tell us to keep our promise.”

Does the last stanza, the tragic story of a pony, indicate we kept our promise to them by continuing to share living space with them – or, that in so doing, we harmed them because our living spaces aren’t suitable for them? (In fact, are they truly suitable for us?!)

And then of course, there’s the question of which branch really evolved – humans or (non-human) animals.
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Trust yourself

“You do not have to be good./You do not have to walk on your knees/for a hundred miles through the desert repenting./You only have to let the soft animal of your body/love what it loves.” --Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”

Is it natural and instinctive, then, for humans to love (non-human) animals, even though too often that instinct is smothered? Such a natural love seems reasonable, given humankind’s reputation in some circles for innate goodness. Then again, the second part – about suppressed instincts – also seems true. (Just think about the newspaper stories of people who abuse animals – cock fights to Michael Vick’s dog fights to setting dogs and cats on fire, to drowning kittens. . .)

These first five lines from the poem remind me of a slogan I’ve learned and liked from the New Jersey Animal Rights Alliance (NJ-ARA.org): “No one can do everything, but everyone can do something.” In other words, don’t wait to be perfect or till you can do it all before reaching out; instead, reaching out contributes to whatever perfection humans might be capable of.

Even though Mary Oliver may have been writing about admitting love for other humans, I’d like to think she was trying to summon our better selves, to remind us of our kinship w/ animals and to treat them in the right, humane way. That humans sometimes have dominance over animals is just a quirk of fate and doesn’t ever make us better than them.
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