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The portrait, or sketch, piece is one of our staples and can be applied to animals. As always, details rather than generatlizations, make the reality.
The Magpie
Mulling and clucking under its breath
Like the tanned and stained
homeless man downtown.
Huge and black and white
gloriously white, like rabbits' fur.
Breast feathers pristine
without benefit of rasping,
rough cat tongue.
It mewed and whispered,
rolled its small obsidian eyes,
tail flashing blue pearls upon liftoff.
The branch vibrating
seconds after
the last huff of a wingbeat
pushed the air away.—Deborah Crooks
Based on Charles Simic's "Stone," in which the poet whisks out imaginations inside a plain rock and there into a sort of fairyland remnant, "Going-Inside" Pieces perform the very basic act of empathetic penetration of "the other." As in:
Tripping in Cell
Stuck in sticky cell jam
my hands clasp the walls and
Martha Graham did a dance like this
using an elastic bag as
elastic plasma membrane containing
slurpy elastic blob blopping cytosolI bounce against altochondria
climb twisted DNA into a Jungian mansion
up is down into
ancient rooms
can't breathe for the dust
I'm an ape! no...
a whale.....
am I a whale or an ape or a
whale of an ape!
amoeba pear viking.... can't decipher this
genetic code caught between a chicken and its egg.Whatever..... I'm stuck in this lethargic liquid
bang my head on a nucleus
feels like I've got a rock in my shoe.—Karin Rathert
Concrete poetry emphasizes the visual (sometimes sound) aspects of letters and words. It's as old as writing itself, which has always had (we can still see it in present-day Chinese) a pictorial component, just as language has always had a musical component. In the Middle Ages, emblem poems were constructed in shapes of cross or angels' wings, etc.
