OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID167and normalized it as an abstraction (the livestock industry) to make it
seem unproblematic. By imagining himself as an animal, Murray is able
in these poems to give us some sense of the experience of slaughter from
the animal perspective.
Because the trope of the speaking animal is so common and so often
associated with childish anthropomorphism, it is worth examining one
more speaking-animal poem: A. R. Ammons’s “Turning,” whose ambig-
uously animal speaker addresses a lion who is in the process of killing
it. The poem presents a version of hybridity in creating an artful human
expression of animal being, and also in suggesting that predation (as
in James Dickey’s “The Heaven of Animals”) involves a fusion of two
beings into one. Indeed, we can never be sure who the speaker is. It is
likely an animal, perhaps a gazelle or an ostrich, who turns from a
waterhole to see a lioness stalking it. But the poem invites us to imagine
the speaker as human as well, since its identity is never made clear, and
the poem’s intensely metaphoric language foregrounds human concepts
of beauty, language, artfulness, and hunting. This is a poem that liter-
ally romanticizes the act of predation, representing it as a kind of sexual
encounter.
She came to my chest and we fell into
the waterhole................
never have I seen
more beauty
than is in this evening
Her paw touched my lips as if
she loved me passionate and loud
so I said
Loose lioness
and her lips took the words from my throat
her warm tongue flicking the living flutter
of my being
So I fumbled about in the darkness for my wings
and the grass looked all around at the evening^22