The Badger

                                                     by John Clare

The badger grunting on his woodland track
With shaggy hide and sharp nose scrowed with black
Roots in the bushes and the woods, and makes
A great high burrow in the ferns and brakes.
With nose on ground he runs an awkward pace,
And anything will beat him in the race.
The shepherd's dog will run him to his den
Followed and hooted by the dogs and men.
The woodman when the hunting comes about
Goes round at night to stop the foxes out
And hurrying through the bushes to the chin
Breaks the old holes, and tumbles headlong in.

When midnight comes a host of dogs and men
Go out and track the badger to his den,
And put a sack within the hole, and lie
Till the old grunting badger passes bye.
He comes and hears—they let the strongest loose.
The old fox hears the noise and drops the goose.
The poacher shoots and hurries from the cry,
And the old hare half wounded buzzes bye.
They get a forked stick to bear him down
And clap the dogs and take him to the town,
And bait him all the day with many dogs,
And laugh and shout and fright the scampering hogs.
He runs along and bites at all he meets:
They shout and hollo down the noisy streets.

He turns about to face the loud uproar
And drives the rebels to their very door.
The frequent stone is hurled where e'er they go;
When badgers fight, then every one's a foe.
The dogs are clapt and urged to join the fray;
The badger turns and drives them all away.
Though scarcely half as big, demure and small,
He fights with dogs for bones and beats them all.
The heavy mastiff, savage in the fray,
Lies down and licks his feet and turns away.
The bulldog knows his match and waxes cold,
The badger grins and never leaves his hold.
He drives the crowd and follows at their heels
And bites them through—the drunkard swears and reels.

The frighted women take the boys away,
The blackguard laughs and hurries on the fray.
He tries to reach the woods, an awkward race,
But sticks and cudgels quickly stop the chase.
He turns again and drives the noisy crowd
And beats the many dogs in noises loud.
He drives away and beats them every one,
And then they loose them all and set them on.
He falls as dead and kicked by boys and men,
Then starts and grins and drives the crowd again;
Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies
And leaves his hold and cackles, groans, and dies.

Some keep a baited badger tame as hog
And tame him till he follows like the dog.
They urge him on like dogs and show fair play.
He beats and scarcely wounded goes away.
Lapt up as if asleep, he scorns to fly
And seizes any dog that ventures nigh.
Clapt like a dog, he never bites the men
But worries dogs and hurries to his den.
They let him out and turn a harrow down
And there he fights the host of all the town.
He licks the patting hand, and tries to play
And never tries to bite or run away,
And runs away from the noise in hollow trees
Burnt by the boys to get a swarm of bees.

ca. 1840

H is for Hawk

                                                        by Helen Macdonald

We noted the numbers. We stared down at the boxes, at their parcel-tape handles, their doors of thin plywood and hinges of carefully tied string. Then he knelt on the concrete, untied a hinge on the smaller box and squinted into its dark interior. A sudden thump of feathered shoulders and the box shook as if someone had punched it, hard, from within. 'She's got her hood off,' he said, and frowned. That light, leather hood was to keep the hawk from fearful sights. Like us.

Another hinge untied. Concentration. Infinite caution. Daylight irrigating the box. Scratching talons, another thump. And another. Thump. The air turned syrupy, slow, flecked with dust. The last few seconds before a battle. And with the last bow pulled free, he reached inside, and amidst a whirring, chaotic clatter of wings and feet and talons and a high-pitched twittering and it's all happening at once, the man pulls an enormous, enormous hawk out of the box and in a strange coincidence of world and deed a great flood of sunlight drenches us and everything is brilliance and fury. The hawk's wings, barred and beating, the sharp fingers of her dark-tipped primaries cutting the air, her feathers raised like the scattered quills of a fretful porpentine. Two enormous eyes. My heart jumps sideways. She is a conjuring trick. A reptile. A fallen angel. A griffon from the pages of an illuminated bestiary. Something bright and distant, like gold falling through water. A broken marionette of wings, legs and light-splashed feathers. She is wearing jesses, and the man holds them. For one awful, long moment she is hanging head-downward, wings open, like a turkey in a butcher's shop, only her head is turned right-way-up and she is seeing more than she has ever seen before in her whole short life. Her world was an aviary no larger than a living room. Then is was a box. But now it is this; and she can see everything: the point-source glitter on the waves, a diving cormorant a hundred yards out; pigment flakes under wax on the lines of parked cars; far hills and the heather on the and miles and miles of sky where the sun spreads on dust and water and illegible things moving in it that are white scraps of gulls. Everything startling and new-stamped on her entirely astonished brain.

Through all this the man was perfectly calm. He gathered up the hawk in one practised movement, folding her wings, anchoring her broad feathered back against his chest, gripping her scaled yellow legs in one hand. 'Let's get that hood back on,' he said tautly. There was concern in his face. It was born of care. This hawk had been hatched in an incubator, had broken from a frail bluish eggshell into a humid perspex box, and for the first few days of her life this man had fed her with scraps of meat held in a pair of tweezers, waiting patiently for the lumpen, fluffy chick to notice the food and eat, her new neck wobbling with the effort of keeping her head in the air. All at once I loved this man, and fiercely. I grabbed the hood from the box and turned to the hawk. Her beak was open, her hackles raised; her wild eyes were the colour of sun on white paper, and they stared because the whole world had fallen into them at once. One, two, three. I tucked the hood over her head. There was a brief intimation of a thin, angular skull under her feathers, of an alien brain fizzing and fusing with terror. Then I drew the braces closed. We checked the ring numbers against the form.

It was the wrong bird. This was the younger one. The smaller one. This was not my hawk.

 Helen MacDonald,  H is for Hawk. 2014: 53-54.

If a mouse frightened a pregnant woman

                      by John Skoyles

Hypnotized

My grandmother called me to the porch

of our railroad flat which overlooked

backyard plots divided by discarded

window frames, Christmas trees, and

doors on their sides. She pointed

to a snake on the handrail, and a finch

on the post, saying the snake

had hypnotized the bird. Their eyes

were locked. I never paid attention

to those superstitious tales from her native Italy –

if a mouse frightened a pregnant woman

and she grabbed her throat in panic,

a rodent-shaped mark would appear

on the newborn's neck. I was thinking
about this when the bird flew toward
the snake who opened his mouth and swallowed it.

Borges

The book dealer collected Borges firsts,

so when that blind writer

lectured nearby, he stood on line

to have them signed.

Stacking each volume on the rostrum

and naming it,

the dealer clicked his pen,

handing it to Borges who said

even he did not own such rare works,

and clicked the pen again.

Too polite to comment, the dealer

walked away, every signal invisible.

From The American Poetry Review, January/February 2015.

Black braids like hound dogs

LA PERRERA OF CHAVEZ RAVINE

                                  by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo

                   

                          Chavez Ravine, 1949

La Perrera lived with a handsome man

much younger than she.

Neighbor women gossiped across clotheslines

that she held him with witchcraft.

But it was long black braids streaked white

that kept him coming to her bed.

At night, she entwined his taut body to her,

braids weaving through limbs,

around iron posts of her bed,

between wooden slats of her shack,

until she, he and everything around became one.

But on August days, when want grew restless,

she commanded black braids like hound dogs,

like hairy henchmen, to sniff him out

of factories or construction sites

and guide him home. Once, he was in an orchard

as far out as Oxnard with arms full of oranges

when braids hunted him down.

Bright orbs dropped to the fertile soil,

and off he was led back to her bosom, to her lips,

to her hips, bed and shack. But he never minded

when he found himself wrapped in her.

From The American Poetry Review, January/February 2015.

Suicidally beautiful galloping sons

GO SO YOU CAN COME BACK

                                    by Jared Harel

Go so you can come back,

says my wife, meaning go but don't linger

in frozen foods, or forget

where you parked, or chat up the cashier.

Go, certainly because something

needs getting while our daughter takes a nap

and the snow isn't snowing,

and here are some coupons that happen

to be expiring, so go before all the produce

turns soft and stringy,

and school lets out, and a tallish boy

hawking fruit snacks

by the entrance wins you over, and you throw him

cash, your wallet, everything for the sake

of his under-funded football team

because though you never loved football

you love James Wright's poem about football

and solitude, and those suicidally

beautiful, galloping sons

and go because I love you, though I also love

those parmesan pop chips,

and to love is to leave

room for longing, but come back

so that we might go out together, later,

in a perpetual rotation of goings and comings

which require nothing but patience

and faith that when we go

we remember where is home.  

From The American Poetry Review, January/February 2015.

AUTUMN BEGINS IN MARTINS FERRY, OHIO

                                        by James Wright

In the Shreve High football stadium,

I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,

And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,

And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,

Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.

Their women cluck like starved pullets,

Dying for love.

Therefore,

Their sons grow suidically beautiful

At the beginning of October,

And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/autumn-begins-martins-ferry-ohio

Bullet Park

                                                                                  by John Cheever

Holy Communion. Sexagesima. Nailles heard a cricket in the chancel and the noise of a tin drum from the rain gutters while he said his prayers. His sense of the church calendar was much more closely associated with the weather than with the revelations and structures in Holy Gospel. St. Paul meant blizzards. St. Mathais meant a thaw. For the marriage at Cana and the cleansing of the leper the oil furnace would still be running although the vents in the stained-glass windows were sometimes open to the raw spring air. Abstain from fornication. Possess your vessel in honor. Jesus departs from the coast of Tyre and Sidon as the skiing ends. For the crucifixion a bobsled stands stranded in a flowerbed, its painter coiled among the early violets. The trout streams open for the resurrection. The crimson cloths at Pentecost and the miracle of the tongues meant swimming. St. James and Resurrection fell on the first warm days of summer when you could smell the climbing roses by the window and when an occasional stray bee would buzz into the house of God and buzz out again. Trinity carried one into summer, the dog days and the drought, and the parable of the samaritan was spoken as the season changed and the gentle sounds of the night garden turned as harsh as hardware. The flesh lusteth against the spirit to the smoke of leaf fires as did the raising of the dead. Then one was back again with St. Andrew and the snows of Advent.

From Chapter 2 of John Cheever, Bullet Park, 1969.

Nothing is more permanent than the temporary

                                                    by A. E. Stallings

             After a Greek Proverb             Ουδέν μονιμότερον του προσωρινού       

We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query—

Just for a couple of years, we said, a dozen years back.

Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

We dine sitting on folding chairs—they were cheap but cheery.

We’ve taped the broken window pane. TV’s still out of whack.

We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query.

When we crossed the water, we only brought what we could carry,

But there are always boxes that you never do unpack.

Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

Sometimes when I’m feeling weepy, you propose a theory:

Nostalgia and tear gas have the same acrid smack.

We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query—

We stash bones in the closet when we don’t have time to bury,

Stuff receipts in envelopes, file papers in a stack.

Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

Twelve years now and we’re still eating off the ordinary:

We left our wedding china behind, afraid that it might crack.

We’re here for the time being, we answer to the query,

But nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

              Poetry (January 2012).