Kent, Margaret

LIVING WITH ANIMALS

1. It has been said that dogs drink at the River
2. Nile while running along that they might not be
3. seized by crocodiles.
4.  
5. These mornings I lie awake listening for signs
6. of life in the house: the scurrying of mice
7. in the eaves, the tick of birds in the gutters,
8. the sure-footed step of love outside my door.
9. Grumbling, I rise. The darkness has washed me
10. clean of shadows. I am a groundhog emerging
11. on the last day of the year, squinting down
12. light tumbling in pieces behind me, shapes of
13. where I’ve been, no idea of what’s to come.
14.  
15. Of a concrete nature, it’s Sunday: ribs and
16. God and rest, the long slow grinding down of
17. afternoon, the inevitable ride toward darkness,
18. animals fading in the fields, at the sides of
19. roads. We cross the bridge to Arkansas, our
20. hands in our laps, the radio playing hymns,
21. “this blinding light that comes with love”
22. is nothing now, a failure, the sad overloading
23. of the heart’s circuits, this dark house
24. condemned by love, condemned by love.
25.  
26. It is another light that divides us now, clear
27. shapes again in the fields, in the mirror, at
28. the edge of roads: yellow dogs, for instance,
29. their fur muddied and bedraggled, casualties
30. of the river, perhaps, or of morning: how when
31. I see white teeth bared sideways to the sun,
32. the pale conversion of tongue to dust, the
33. befuddled cowlick along the spine, I think of you,
34. how we outran the danger but surrendered to time.
35.  
36. It is growing dark. At the edge of the fields
37. the levee rises like a brown serpent feeding on
38. fireflies. Our separate lives, I suppose, have
39. never stood much of a chance. But think of
40. the animals we have known and feared and
41. nurtured in this black of night and know
42. fear leaves us all head down at last, running
43. blindly along some river and always alone.
44.  
45. At home in my room I listen: the pear tree
46. outside my window is a blasphemy of evening birds.
47. They chatter as if daylight had never before abandoned
48. them. I think it is so. Sometime later, I make tea
49. and write you these words: in a forest of peccaries,
50. a wart-hog is the sole dissenter. In a forest of
51. wart-hogs, a peccary is a welcome sound. In a forest
52. of both, bread crumbs make not a hair’s breadth of difference.