Poetry and Animals

182OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID

two remote

feet. Then

it spoke, then

hair grew, and eyes,

and I

forgot my-

self—oh

no, oh not

(t hey say)

this like

an animal

he eats, and looks

like an animal

at us. It

spoke. Who

said it

could not, who

did not know.^40

In the first stanza the animal is an object studied and defined, its own
anatomy (“the head”) also in a sense dismembered, a categorized com-
ponent rather than part of a unified self. This is what it means, from a
behaviorist standpoint, to be animal. The animal is primitive, funda-
mental, and its bodily signs “mean” something of basic behavior and
survival. The “I” of the third stanza is perhaps the normal human
speaker of poems, not like this other creature, who is both human (with
arms hanging) and not, since it does not speak. Being able to say “I”
defines the not animal. Yet the animal defined in the poem is real—a
creature out of the prehistoric past, our evolutionary ancestor—and
a  trope for the kind of human we and the speaker have become (the
speaker also stands, eats, is represented, and may be “the animal” of the