Animals, like horses, are good fodder for poetry because they engage our imaginations in and of themselves, so the poet is half way there in his journey toward a capturing of his audience. I have used them for their instinctive brutality, their simple, but beautiful violence as in this poem of mine about a shrike. To inform the poem, I am offering Wikipedia's concise description of the bird: A shrike is a passerine bird of the family Laniidae which is known for its habit of catching insects, small birds or mammals and impaling their bodies on thorns. This helps them to tear the flesh into smaller, more conveniently-sized fragments, and serves as a "larder" so that the shrike can return to the uneaten portions at a later time. A typical shrike's beak is hooked, like that of a bird of prey, reflecting its predatory nature. Most shrike species occur in Eurasia and Africa, but two breed in North America (the Loggerhead and Great Grey shrikes). There are no members of this family in South America or Australia. Some shrikes are also known as "butcher birds" because of their habit of keeping corpses. Australasian butcherbirds are not shrikes, although they occupy a similar ecological niche. Several African species are known as fiscals, derived from the Afrikaans term for the hangman, fiskaal.

Here is my attempt to capture the essence of shrike, maybe even the essence of animal, maybe even of man as murderer:

Dark, dull bird, grayed inside and out,
You shriek barbs to hang the sweaty frog,
Applaud him limp to the last
Electric twitch of the long thigh
Before dismemberment.

The wind pictured you deserted,
But yet decisive against the hot sun;
Then with catlike skill you struck the air,
Putting on the panther's sleek
Slide with head hung
And shoulders reared.

You spun mid-arc;
Your bandit eye pinned the clumsy
Speck that hopped haphazardly,
That studied crouching weeds from side to side
With every haul and gathering of leg.
It was with such smooth grace
That you fell out of air and
Stabbed him in the dirt.

Wings stretched and wings curled and
Wings quivered with hydraulic friction.
Your muscles would not stop.
You wrenched the spasmic bull
Upon the fence to pop the leather skin.
Your swollen, ruffled breast
Responded blood for blood.

I taught for two years in Bedford County, VA. Horse country. Once when I went to the house of a six grader's of mine to pick up a quarter of a deer, a gift, I came upon the birthing of a colt, a startling sight! What I remember most was the grunting and the way the prone mare's four legs raised and stood stiffly for a minute out to the side as she apparently had a contraction. I remember too the nearness to the event. The boy came down to meet me and commented that she had to be watched in case complications arose. I took my deer and left as soon as possible. As a teacher and therefore a sort of member of the community, my wife and I were also once invited to a Kentucky Derby party. Despite efforts to include us, we evidently didn't really fit in; besides, it was a grotesque mockery of the real thing--or was this the real thing too. I hoped not. The only one we really knew there was the doctor who had invited us. He rode his horse to church and to this party. Six months later, he shot himself. Anyway, hors d'oeuvres were served and women wore large hats and men drank Jim Beam and Southern Comfort and bets were bet. Then at the appointed time, we all gathered around the TV for the race. We left promptly thereafter (it does appear that I am always absconding from any given scene). All of this has been brought to mind, including the horses the rich judge's daughter bought for the commune when we joined it with our two kids--god only knows what happened to those poor beasts--and stories of my wife's childhood summers on her grandparents' farm where she and the cousins got into trouble riding the work horses, all of this has come to mind because of the death of Eight Belles and because I have been remembering too James Wright's poem about his and Robert Bly's mystical moment with horses one evening on the side of the road. Frankly, horses scare the hell out of me. I guess the truth of the matter is that I don't trust them. But they are remarkably beautiful creatures and so there is that aesthetic thing. But a horse race is not about beauty; it's about money. And so as I understand it, it is acceptable as in most actions for money to do anything that needs to be done to make as much money as possible, which includes for the horse-racing industry apparently excessive inbreeding, racing immature horses, racing them on a course too long for their strength, and doping them. The result is a lot of dead horses. But maybe there are plenty to go around, and though a horse lurching about that then has to be euthanized immediately is an unfortunate circumstance, people want the spectacle and are willing to pay the big bucks to see it. Now I am remembering Vronsky's intense pain and bitter disappointment when his horse Frou Frou has to be put down because he made a wrong move that results in breaking her back. What a scene as she looks back at him with those large, pitiful, beseeching eyes. Maybe when we juxtapose James Wright's poem The Blessing against the reality of some horses' lives and deaths, the poet's portrayal of horses may come off as wanton sentimentalism. Nevertheless, I offer it here as a eulogy for Eight Belles:

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

Someone once said the following: "There is nothing that can be said by mathematical symbols and relations which cannot also be said by words. The converse, however, is false. Much that can be and is said by words cannot successfully be put into equations, because it is nonsense." And we might add because much of it is untrue. I listened this morning to the NPR interview with Ms. Tillman, the mother of the young patriot Pat Tillman who was killed by friendly fire, rather than by enemy fire in the pursuit of heroic action, which the Army falsely demarcated by the awarding of the Silver Star posthumously and presented of course to the family. Well, this member of the family was not content with that rendition and as it turns out with the military's second rendition either, she assuming, I suppose, that if they lied once, they can just as easily lie twice and thrice and ad infinitum, and she was going to find out the truth if the truth could be found. To find the truth involved the kind of investigation that one would expect of the government when there is a shocking and outrageous cover up--which in our mathematical formula equals outrageous lie--but which in this case was left to the mother, who has written a book about her findings. And the truth is not a pretty sight: apparently the men were firing in a sort battle frenzy and as they admit themselves ignored the gestures of cease fire they saw from the men that they must have suspected could be their own. Ms. Tillman certainly has gotten closer to the truth, but only someone who was there and able to see the moment from all the geographical angles--physical and emotional--can really know the whole truth. But we must applaud the careful, investigative nature of this mother's search for the cause of her son's death, and for her shift of our perspective so that rather than getting what the government wanted--to rally sentiment for the war--what they got instead was further evidence that putting young men and women in these emotionally debilitating and enervating circumstances is morally wrong and utterly inhumane. Hemingway's entire moral compass as an artist, I mentioned recently, was to tell the absolute truth as completely as it is possible for any human being to know it, and he pursued that truth relentlessly in his works. Interestingly, much of his vision we know was forged in the fires of his own involvement in war, and a war's purpose which he knew was belied by the sentimental and mendacious claptrap milled by the military propagandists who cared not a jot for the sad young soldier slogging his way through mud and smoke and blood possibly to his own agonizing and protracted death. Here's Hemingway's notion of war and the pretty lies used to describe it: "I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice. . . . We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates." I agree. It is best to keep our focus on the precise and mathematical dimensions of things; once we get too far adrift in the emotional field, we can't seem to find our way back to the truth and sometimes don't even want to.

As I recollected recently past events in my own life as a father and my father' failures and weaknesses and of course expected demise, and present absence, I was reminded that life is all about loss. Also, I am reminded that we are always alone, but if we have drawn comforting presences about us here and there, we have only hidden, and conceivably prolonged, the undeniable truth that we end up alone and finally we die alone. Frost seemed to be reflecting on such a truth in his poem Bereft in which he faces a threatening storm that he seems to interpret as an enemy force about to take all he has left, and having lost everything else, the all he has left is his life. His inventive allusion to the snake in the garden (the leaves that are swept up by the wind into the shape of a snake and that makes the leaves hiss to confirm the image--I sometimes think of this poem when leaves rise up in a miniature tornadic funnel when I am about the yard before one of nature's fracases) confirms that life is ultimately about inescapable pain and inevitably about persistent death. He says,

Where had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking down hill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and day was past.
Somber clouds in the west were massed.
Out in the porch's sagging floor,
leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly struck at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.

He has heard the wind before doing this because he has faced losses many times before; it's just that having lost everything, he has only his own life to lose now. To have nothing left except God is to be at annihilation's door.

And then there is Elizabeth Bishop's masterful villanelle One Art that blusters forth the notion that a person can learn to master loss, maybe suggesting that the poet's art provides a form by which the chaos and madness and thievery of existence can be dealt with, managed, accepted, maybe even in a humanly delusional way even triumphed over. One Art is her attempt to convince herself that one can become inured to loss: first she can accept because some of the things in this world are evidently designed to be lost, keys for example. But she also advises practicing accepting the loss of things escalating the stakes to stiffen the lip and harden the heart and steel the mind and will so it doesn't matter the size or importance of the loss. But just as she struggles to forget the houses and the rivers and even the continents, we slowly become aware of her inability to forget or to accept. We know that she is vulnerable even as she tries to convince us of her invulnerability. We know that she has an Achilles' heel and it appears in the last stanza when she tries to forget a lover with the magic word master only to realize that the poetic form she has chosen requires that she end the emotion on the word disaster; she screams out the truth--parentheses cannot make this emotion parenthetical--that there it is impossible for her mastery her despair:

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

---Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Only the poet can make us feel that heart’s blood-drenched pang: She blithely sings the words: “The art of losing’s not too hard to master / though it may look like,” then the fatal interruption occurs, the choking back of tears, the clenching of the teeth and fists, the swallowing of the scream to demand of herself that she face what she cannot avoid facing—Write it!—facing her unbearable pain.

When my wife yelled up the driveway this afternoon on her way to the grocery for me who could not give up the work in the yard that we had a flat tire, I immediately went into the panic-I-am-being-called-upon-to-do-mechanical-emergency-things mode. Quickly, I went in my mind to the last time this happened at dusk on the way into Roanoke for a concert our oldest son was putting on at the Jefferson Center, which was the first time I had ever had to change a tire on a Subaru. We immediately called our car service that said they would be at least an hour or more and so proceeded to try to change it with flashlight and car manual in hand ourselves. We called our youngest son who happened to be in Roanoke and who instantly said he was on his way and came before we figured the lugs out and changed the tire for us, in fact, in time for us to get to our evening concert. I insisted of course that given more time I would have been able to do it myself. And today did so without a hitch, well, except for the fact that I began to sweat fear when I was having trouble loosening the last two lugs until I remembered that it is better to lift than to push down, or at least I think that is the way I finally figured out how to get them free. In my typical associative way, I thought back to those days when my father insisted I be his apprentice when working on our car. I, of course, living with him under duress and continuously unhappy if he were stationed at home rather than in Australia, refused to be willingly helpful and attentive. Looking back, I suspect he recognized my sullen attitude and my exuding of my usual intellectual superiority and disdain for things mechanical and consequently greasy. Now removed from those painful times and now two years older than my father lived (he died at sixty one of what can only be deemed massive assault upon the body by alcohol and cigarettes, bad eating habits, and a total lack of physical exercise), I wonder if he were trying to reach out to me, to share with me something of his expertise, to be a father. Even if I had thought that was what he was trying to do, I would have still outright rejected his overtures because, because I was lost and confused and hurt by the world's hurtling me about in the storm of its vicissitudes. I joke to my sons that I had my chance to know the car, to feel comfortable when something happens to it, and actually the chance to be an expert--my father could do anything to a car. But I obviously missed an important opportunity. And I am tempted to say that I would never have been able to get it, being an abstract thinker and a poet, but that's most likely a load of crap. My sons are not poets, but they are artistic in their own ways, and yet they are adept at mechanical things, an ability that they obviously didn't pick up from me. My oldest son and I did build a closet together once, so I know at least I introduced him to that world, however limited and crude. But I was a bit irresponsible and indifferent I see now because I usually did things by myself. When my youngest son got arrested for the usual teenage lawlessness, he was forced to do community service. He chose to do a stint with Habitat for Humanity. When I dropped him off to work that first day, I realized suddenly that unlike the little project I had had my oldest help me with, I had never even taught my youngest how to hammer or saw or use a level. My kids laugh at my general ineptitude at mechanical things--though I have to say for a poet I am not completely all thumbs--but my love for them and my dedication to family they know have been the primary driving forces of my existence. I could never say the same for my father, but then I always sensed that if he had had a little more of the poet in him he might have realized that that was what I needed from him more than a lesson in how to clean a carburetor.

Poetry can be architectural, that is, take on shapes. I once wrote a poem while sitting bored in my graduate Chaucer class, which assumed the shape of a bird, two wings with rhymes along the fringes and the word dove sticking out beyond the margin to form the beak. It became a metaphor for my poetry and I affixed it to the volume of poems I wrote for my creative writing dissertation. Recently, I have come to see the oddest things as poems--I have written elsewhere heretofore about found poems, but my bird-shaped poem belongs to that group of poems known as shape or concrete poetry. Shape poems were popular in earlier Christian times when symbols as revealed in a study of bestiaries abounded in everyone's imaginations. George Herbert's Altar is a familiar example:

The Altar

A broken ALTAR, Lord thy servant rears,
Made of a heart, and cemented with teares:
Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
No workmans tool hath touch'd the same

A HEART alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy pow'r doth cut.
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame,
To praise thy Name:

That if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease.
O let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,
And sanctifie this ALTAR to be thine.
Modern poets, too, because they were revolutionary in their poetic thinking investigated the use of complementary forms as in this poem by J. Zimmerman entitled The Lost and Found of Dreams: Brussels:

I strode off the
high cathedral
top-most step like a
miracle worker, or a
Blessed
passing the final exam for
Saint. The
city expanded at my
feet. For one
pico-second, I
flew.
I fell. I can't
remember how
(bruised but
unbroken) I
ended, though I
remember the
long
fall, and
(this was the first time you saved me)
your cat-like
twist as you
threw yourself
faster than the grab
of gravity
below me so
your chest protected
my face,
your arms
wrapped around me,
your body
grated for mine against
granite, while we
tumbled like
cast-out
angels.

It looks like a conventional poem here, but it should look like a descending staircase with each line indented slightly to the right down the page. All of this discussion was prompted, however, by the notion that mathematical problems, which I have been working on in the last month, are themselves a kind of concrete poetry. Even the word problems sometimes surprise me. Here is one, which I am arranging as if it were a poem:

An investor bought some stock
In a water company and some
In a uranium mine. After holding
Them a month, he sold them.
He found he had made forty-five
Bucks. "If I don't count
The brokerage," he told his wife,
"I made four times as much on
The water stock as I lost on
The uranium." The wife asked,
Then how much did you lose?

But can we consider the following poetic as I think we can, a kind of architectural poetry; this comes from a section in the math book I checked out of the library headed First-Degree Equations in Two Variables: 5a divided by 4 + b =11 divided by 2 and a + b divided by 3 = 3. Solve for the values of a and b that will solve both equations. Unfortunately, I don't have a keyboard that will allow me to let you actually see the way the equations look on a page. You may remember from your childhood, but you need a fresh look, so you will have to copy the problems down on a piece of paper and then solve them and by doing so you may begin to understand what I mean.

When I saw him standing there at the bus stop with his roller cart of groceries, I immediately felt sorry for him and especially so now that he was going to get on the bus with all these college kids. He was much older and, of course, he had that look of the downtrodden, the disadvantaged, the local citizen, a townee. Nevertheless, he lifted his heavy load before him and entered the noisy crowd and took a seat as close to the front as possible. To roll his cart and to wend his way to whatever vacant seat might still exist, I suspect, was beyond his capabilities, though he would have had no trouble thrashing any of these young studs even with their washboard abs they exercise to create every afternoon after classes in one of the state of the art gyms provided by his and their taxpayer dollars. I imagined that he made his presence as small as possible, hunched down within his oversized body covered by his somewhat frayed and begrimed clothing. They may have glimpsed his entrance, but were engrossed in their own realities. They used words like transitioned, internship, linguistics, unswerving, and nebulae. But he was isolated, immune to whatever they might say, maybe even immune to what they might say about him. They spoke of trips to Europe or the islands, of wild and reckless parties before the departure to their comfortable and spacious homes, or of taking that French class for elective credit or the quantum physics class that they heard was taught by the best professor only during the summer months. They talked freely and loudly on their cell phones; they laughed deeply and carelessly while nudging and jostling each other; or they were plugged into the music that allowed them to be removed from all the noise and otherness of the world, just when they needed it most. They were dressed in loose, soft, childish clothing from Gap and Old Navy and Liz Claiborne and Vera Bradley and Nike and all the other popular caterers and panderers to and of their every whim. He knew it was best not to think about the difference for the difference was incalculable, incomprehensible, and at some level, unendurable. Or maybe he just didn't give a damn. Or maybe he was less oafish than I had imagined and relished unselfishly the joy and purposefulness of so many young people, recognizing in his silent way that what he witnessed was what all young people should have. Maybe bitter rancor was not his cup but rather he quaffed from the cup of generosity and humanity and understanding and acceptance. Maybe he was Zeus in shepherd’s clothing.