Poetry and Animals

158OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID

(also its Latinate “scientific” nomenclature) because of its dragon-like
appearance. The actual animal is thus newer to our awareness than
our imaginings of it suggest it should be. The creature is invested with
human meaning that makes it something fabulous and that hides its
actual nature from us. The poem develops this meaning even as it
includes many details of the actual lizard.
The poem’s first stanza is a good example of its duality, its simultane-
ous modes of indirection and precision.

In blazing driftwood

the green keeps showing at the same place;

as intermittently, the fire opal shows blue and green.

In Costa Rica the true Chinese lizard face

is found, of the amphibious falling dragon, the living firework.^8

The poem’s nonlyrical (or encyclopedic) narrator begins by describing
the basilisk’s luminous green color, though it takes a while to figure this
out, since she gives other instances of this color’s elusiveness: it can be
seen at a specific point of the flame produced by burning driftwood or
in flecks in the normally red and yellow fire opal. This is a kind of green
that, like the animal, is difficult to see but distinct and clear when it is
seen. The poem’s second sentence involves several more imaginative
leaps. We move from the animal’s color to a kind of geographical rid-
dle, one that is also symbolic of the animal’s doubleness. The basilisk is
found in Costa Rica and other parts of Central America but wears the
“true” face of the “Chinese lizard”: that is, of the representations in Chi-
nese art of dragons. The ambiguity of what is “true” here is central. The
true face is both the actual face of the lizard and the actual face of Chi-
nese dragons.
This doubleness—that the creature has its own truth and one of the
human imagination, and that this doubleness is distinctive of the crea-
ture itself—is the hybrid idea of the animal the poem explores. (The
poem also mixes identical syllabic stanzas with a few mutant free-verse
stanzas and a mutant with an extra line, or tail, about the animal’s
tail.) The basilisk is a “living firework,” a “dragon,” “boatlike,” “god,” a