Poetry and Animals

72POEMS OF THE ANIMAL

wonder by anthropomorphizing animals (or simply reading children’s
literature to the speaker, which is itself filled with kindly feeling ani-
mals) allows the speaker to create such a space for himself:

I let myself fall

into the soft arms of animals and then

into their dreams.^35

Animals in the poem inhabit dreams, a bedroom, and memory and cre-
ate a sense of home, suggesting the impossibility of actually represent-
ing either the animal or specific animals. At the same time, however, the
explicitly constructed and anthropomorphized character of the animals
in the poem reminds us of the appeal of actual animals and suggests
that it is possible for a poem to become an expression of a utopian desire
for accord, for a place in the present where the divide between animals
and people might be overcome. It also registers that animal is in the
end just a word, a strange signifier that comes loaded with enormous
baggage, including racist implications and conscious and unconscious
meaning.
That the animal can be a signifier for the ultimately unknowable
is  also at the core of Susan Stewart’s “Four Questions Regarding the
Dreams of Animals,” which poses large unanswerable questions about
what we can know about the inner life of animals (e.g., “Is it true that
they dream?”), in part to suggest that most of what we know of the world
in general comes from what we imagine (or dream).^36 This poem of long
incantatory lines suggests that we know that animals dream because
“we can read their tails and claws as we would read the signs of our own
dreams,” and we can guess at what animals dream by imagining what
a woman might dream when she wanders into a farmhouse that reminds
her of her past. This evocative poem suggests that dreams reflect and
refract reality, intersplicing past and present, “this world or... another.”
“Skeletons of gulls lie scattered on the dunes, their beaks still parted
by whispering. These are the languages that fall beyond our hearing.”
Imagining animal dreams allows Stewart to write of a world that is our
own but also strangely alien. Again, animals represent, or are, beings who