Poetry and Animals

OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID169

of that which is called ‘self,’ ” as though to signal to the turtle that it is
being spoken to and that selfhood is located in the animal body. The
speaker insists on language as rooted in the physical, as though lan-
guage revealed objective facts about the turtle and its world, even as
that language alters the turtle. The speaker is also explicit about the
paradox of imposing a human language, and probably a human con-
ception of language, onto the turtle and therefore doing something
potentially not benign. She makes the turtle “say ‘silence’ and listen. /
Say ‘silence,’ ” thereby destroying the turtle’s silence. In making the tur-
tle know, she is teaching it also to “say ‘compelled’, / say ‘driven,’ say
‘recognition of compulsion.’ ” In the fourth stanza she describes the
sea current and instinct, as well as the effect of her commands, another
form of compulsion, which she imagines can actually give the turtle the
knowledge she has of language and the turtle and, by making it aware,
a degree of free will. She describes the turtle’s life cycle, which it has
already experienced and so of course already “knows.” In the fifth stanza
her language becomes more explicitly metaphoric, suggesting that the
speaker is trying to communicate with the turtle because it has seized
her imagination.

Say “birth by the nearest silver egg

buried in the sky.” Say “invisible glass turtles pulling up

the black beaches above, leaving in the night

the scattered glow of their daring eggs.”

Say “fancy.”

These lines reveal something of the mystery and beauty of the turtle; they
are about its inexplicable knowledge of migration and its instinct for life.
However, these lines are also comic, since the increasingly metaphoric
and fantastic images created by language here are more or less inexplica-
ble even to human readers and probably to the speaker herself. It is a
language made strange by imagining the animal as human, the speaker
as animal. The poem is a love song to the turtle or perhaps the idea of the
turtle, a desire to create some new version of it that will understand
human admiration of it and, implicitly, human power over it.