146THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRYwith our companion animals can and should be a spur to our growing
awareness of the meaning and value of other animals: wild animals
whose lives we affect by altering the planet and hunting them, and those
numberless and nameless domestic animals on factory farms, whose
existence we generally only note when their flesh appears on our plates.^37
There is perhaps no poet in whose work a reader feels the contin-
ual presence of domesticated individual animals more than Maxine
Kumin. She has written hundreds of poems about the animals that
share her farm and home, celebrating them because they are a constant
presence in her life. “Ars Poetica: A Found Poem” presents the seem-
ingly prosaic nature of sustained interaction with a horse as a cause for
celebration—that working with (in this case) a timid horse is not about
a single epiphany but is a long process that leads to “that kind of trust”
that allows horse and human to work together.^38 The poem’s title links
the process of working with the horse to that of working at poetry: both
involve repetition, labor, imagination, and trust that there is someone
else (the horse and the reader) who understands. Her most powerful
evocations of the individual animal come in the series of love poems
for Amanda, her “sensible Strawberry roan.”^39 Together these poems
express insight into the extraordinary bond that develops between
Kumin and one of her horses. Moreover, like Mark Doty’s and W. S.
Merwin’s poems about their dogs, these poems celebrate the life and
identity of this single horse without any embarrassment, acknowledg-
ing a wide range of feeling and meaning in relationships with beloved
pets. In “Amanda Dreams She Has Died and Gone to the Elysian Fields,”
Kumin describes coming upon the horse sleeping in a field in the morn-
ing.^40 The careful description of the moment reveals the speaker’s
absorption in the life of this creature, her regard for it, and their mutual
trust. The comic title points to the impossibility of knowing what the
horse is thinking or dreaming, but that its contentment is palpable.
These are the poem’s final lines:
We sit together.
In this time and place
we are heart and bone.