Poetry and Animals

110POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE

fish-shaped and silvered to steel by the force

of the large desert moon.

The long and careful description of the minute creature becomes an end
in itself, a sudden and almost arbitrary shift away from the realm of
human culture and its co-opting of animals to the specificity of a small
miraculous animal. The poem’s suddenly narrow focus, and this small
animal, are in relief to the various forms of power, sovereignty, and
exploitation the first section of the poem describes. This animal recalls
other animals, the “fawn-breasted / bower-bird” and the “chipmunk,”
again showing that the classification of species is necessarily compara-
tive.^44 One of the pleasures of the poem, and of species identification, is
the recognition that focusing on life at the level of species is already to
single out one from many millions, and to pull one’s attention away
from the realm of the all too human, though by the end of the poem art
is imagined serving the animal, rather than the other way around: “Its
leaps should be set / to the flageolet.”
Moore’s most intensely descriptive species poem is probably “The
Pangolin.”^45 The nine-stanza, ninety-eight line poem develops an elab-
orate comparison between the pangolin (a scaled anteater) and “the
being we call human.” While the pangolin, like the jerboa, is in fact a
genus comprised of seven similar species, the name denotes something
specific, a virtual species to nonscientists.

Another armored animal—scale

lapping scale with spruce-cone regularity until they

form the uninterrupted central

tail-row! This near artichoke with head and legs and grit-

equipped gizzard,

the night miniature artist engineer is,

yes, Leonardo da Vinci’s replica—

impressive animal and toiler of whom we seldom hear.^46

Like many of the animals Moore is drawn to, the pangolin is relatively
unknown to her readers, reclusive, and unusual. Her interest in the