Visiting the Animal
I press my face against the glass
and there he is:
the recognition is complete
my way at least. The padded
luxury of his palms and soles,
the sooty static of his fur,
the lowering brow,
that flat brow stare.
He’s in my dreams
but doesn’t always wait
for dreams: black speck,
in my periphery, hiss
of fists through grass
makes me wish
for graze of leather lips.
He’s shocking—
the heft and burl of him.
Captive, still he’s wild.
My heart beats in time with his.
That wild would crush me.
When I leave I carry him
a tiny lope of black
at each cell’s rim.
About this poem
This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2015. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor in 2015 was Ken MacLeod.
Editor’s comment:
Deep appreciation and identification of what two primates – the one doing the telling, and the one told of – have in common is combined with a sharp-eyed absence of sentimentality, and recognition that it’s more than glass that separates them. I liked, too, the cool precision in the use of similes and scientific language.
Author’s note:
I began writing this poem after an encounter (through glass) with a gorilla in a zoo in Canada. The poem moved through various versions, none of them quite successful, until I was reworking it for this collection, when it occurred to me how much more interesting not to say it’s a gorilla. It’s something wild. It’s animal. Maybe it’s an ancient aspect of the human psyche. Maybe it’s creativity. Maybe it is just a gorilla. When the title of the poem occurred to me, so did the title of the pamphlet and having the title – ‘Visiting the Animal’ – gave a tweak to the meaning of the collection. Almost everything approached through the poems, from a tulip to a great-aunt, can be thought of as animal and the words a way of visiting them.
