OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID187like apes, die and return to earth. More sinister, a police dog who copu-
lates with a woman suggests the brutality of police force, that rape is
used for brutal subjugation and is often followed by murder. While the
examples of the middle stanza seem comic and harmless, the final
example of “a chicken who / Cuts his own throat” reminds us both that
this is what we do to animals and that humans frequently commit sui-
cide (and that “chicken” also means coward). The poem’s power comes
in part from so clearly revealing that humans associate animals, and the
animal, with radical innocence (“The miraculous / Laughing dove”) as
well as with bestiality, violence, and death. The poem’s final stanza
pulls the curtain back on these acts slightly; they depend on a trainer
with sugar and whip, who bribes and punishes to produce his illusions
of animals with human abilities. The human is the sovereign, a stand-in
for civilization, culture, and language itself. But this trainer is also just
another act, huddled with the animals in a cage. The poem’s final image
suggests those awful paintings of anthropomorphized dogs playing
poker, “smoking cheap cigars,” but here in cahoots with the trainer in
learning to cheat. It is a comic image and one that implicates the poem
itself as an animal act, whose notions of inside and outside, master and
beast, depend upon tricks played with marked cards.
Simic’s animal poems are simultaneously light and dark, innocent
and disturbing, because animals in his poems are human signifiers—
cultural ideas and words—and yet contain vestiges of something pri-
mary, natural, and real. They are always hybrid. In “Bestiary for the
Fingers of My Right Hand,” the poet wittily characterizes each finger
with reference to animals, while revealing his body as also animal and
more than animal. The poem suggests that animals are natural in the
sense of being the first metaphors that come to hand. His thumb, for
instance, is a “loose tooth of a horse,” a “rooster to his hens,” and a “fat
worm” and could “go hunting with wolves.” The poem “Strictly Buc-
colic” mocks the concept of the pastoral by playing with the idea that
this strangely enduring genre requires the presence of the animal, “these
mellifluous sheep,” while at the same time being highly artificial, sheep
with “regulation white fleece / Bleached and starched to perfection.” Pas-
toral reduces the human to “the famous mechanical wind-up shepherd,”