Poetry and Animals

80POEMS OF THE ANIMAL

a “domesticated bearded dragon $400.”^48 This animal is not so much a
companion, one imagines, as a curiosity and commodity, suggested too
by the fantastical name for what is in fact a small desert lizard. The
speaker gives a short list of more companionable animals:

A calf asleep on a double bed, perhaps,

or a hare with long ears

crouched under a mahogany sideboard,

thumping the floor.

Or a koala that climbed up a four-poster bed

surprising a seventeen-year-old in her nightie.

These are, notably, warm-blooded creatures, but not creatures normally
thought of as pets. The calf is domesticated but is livestock, while the
hare and koala are presumably wild animals who have wandered inside
and in a sense chosen companionship for themselves. Other examples the
speaker mentions in the poem are of “a neighbor [who] sleeps with a
wombat in her bed” and “kangaroos [that] watch TV through her sitting-
room window.” The people and the animals seem actual neighbors who
have an implicit relationship by sharing the same land, and the bound-
ary between domestic and wild is naturally blurred. These relationships
are evidence that allow the speaker to generalize:

We were once them,

and now are their custodians.

They know we are different

and their eyes tell us to keep our promise.

We might be tempted to dismiss these lines because of their directness
and simplicity, but they contain extraordinary wisdom. We were animals
sometime in the past in the sense that “dew on the leaves... brushed our
flanks”; that is, we had more direct contact with the natural world than
we tend to do now, closeted in homes and cities. “We, the animals, /
knew feelings, had a memory,” as animals now do as well. Cultural rather
than physical evolution has changed our relationship to the natural world