From “How to Assemble the Animal Globe” (Make Yourself Happy)
Bluebuck
its bluehue
beckoned
to which side
of blue
it had to drink daily
which made it easy (to shoot)
eating the best
red grass, spear grass, love grass
blue from dark skin showing thru
If you travel to Uppsalla, Capetown or London you might glimpse one
of the three remaining pairs of horns
A skull in Glasgow, one in Amsterdam
The four mounted specimens (Vienna, Stockholm, Paris, Leiden)
show no sheen of blue
Cape Serval (subspecies, extinct 20th century)
The cat of spare parts1leaps five feet into the air and can change directions there, snatch a bird
(which, if fowl, it will pluck before eating), hear a mouse
underground, hunt
without seeing its prey
Pounces — 40% effective by day
59% in the night
__________________
1 Long legs, enormous ears, long neck, small head, back legs longer than the front.
Bubal Hartebeest (nominate subspecies, North Africa, c. 1925)
As old as Aeschylus, as old as Hebrew and Pliny“colour uniform pale rufous or fawn,” food to many
“a frequent inhabitant of menageries” this
side of the blue
“But we have seen no skin or skull
of a wild-killed specimen”
when viewed head-on, the horns
formed a U; the last captive female
died November 9, Jardin des Plantes, 1923
Get up, you can see that the people have not respected you, get up
and walk away
sings the hartebeest, according
to oral tradition
Aldabra Brush Warbler (confirmed extinct 1986)
“discovered” in 1967described in 19682
lost in 1969
found in 19753
gone in 19834
__________________
2 based on one nest with a mated pair and three eggs
3 6 individuals, all males
4 last known male expired
Mauritius Blue Pigeon (extinct early 1830s)
The Prince of Orange had one in his menagerie(for a few months) in 1790, and from this we know
the voice: “a dove-like cooing during the day,
and rows of 10-12 baf calls in the night”
Did it look like the Dutch
flag or the French? An argument ensued—
Tricolore: head white, tail red, middle blue
It was not, like the pink pigeon (still surviving)
seasonally poisonous or inedible
A Mauritius Blue was meat
for escaped slaves, lost sailors
In 1801, the ship Géographe’s
chief drawer5 (assigned maps and birds) was able to get several for roasting
up in the river gorges, saw
the plucked earth coming
__________________
5 Jacques Gérard Milbert, who wrote in his journal: "Il est un point ou...le défrichement doit s'arreter, si l'un ne veut, en peu d'années, voir succéder a un pays verdoyant et fertile, une terre aride et dépouillée."
Steller’s Sea Cow (first seen by Europeans near Bering Island in 1741, extinct by 1768)
By night, the gomuls took to the skies to hunt & returnedwith a whale impaled on each enormous finger The volcanoes
lit up for the roasting Captain Vitus Bering
landed in a storm then died As to his shipmates
the meat of the sea cow kept them alive
Georg Steller drew & described: “Its skin is black and thick, like the bark
of an old oak”; 4-5 fathoms long, 3.5 fathoms round, weight: 200 puds6
It drifted just below the surface of the water close to shore
“a single animal resembled an overturned boat,” and they stripped its skin
for barks
the last cow was killed for its excellent meat
Had they been mistaken for sirens7 would the flesh have been
so sweet __________________
6 One fathom is 6 feet; 200 puds is about 8,000 pounds.
7 Lonely sailors are said to have mistaken manatees for sirens.
Mid 18th century drawing
Cryptozoology
Poetry runs on gossip, why can’t animals? Phantomcats (black
panthers and pumas way out of their range)
Honshu and Hokkaido wolves heard howling — breathing — stepping on leaves —
I once saw a white detonation from a telephone wire along the highway near High Falls, NY — a symbolon bursting in the eye —
It was a large raptor, not a speck of rufus/grey seemed to fleck it
Found something close in a bird book — a Gyrfalcon, Old Norse
in name, circling far from its range (the light-colored Gyrfalcon are found in Greenland, aiding
crypsis)
(= ability to self-conceal: nocturnality, transparency, camouflage and mimicry)
cryptid
(= how deep do you hide?)
A Gyrfalcon
Lays a golden egg
Wing chord, tarsal, tail and culmen working together for
Swan-hunting in China
A man with a gyrfalcon on his fist
Is rich
A woman
With a Gyrfalcon on her mind is
Changing the yaw-angle mid flight
Baijii (Lipotes vexillifer) (First described in the Erya, 3BCE, last possible sighting 2007)
Goddess of the YangtzeeLeft-behind flag bearer
A princess thrown to the river by her father for following
her own counsel
The first Laowai who saw one shot it, shipped it
to the Smithsonian
“You approach your refined language” and then you
move away
Black soft-shell turtle (Nilssonia nigricans)
each turtlea sinner
saved by a saint
the last party
of saved sinners lives
in a pond by the Chittagong shrine
Japanese River Otter (declared ex. 2012)
It ateeels,
beetles,
crabs, shrimp,
fish,
watermelon and
sweet potatoes
Five poems from Make Yourself Happy
I HAD TAKEN THE LONG WAY HOME, the really long way.I traveled to the edge of the human continent. There, I couldn’t tell the difference between the insurgents and the Mennonites. The Shaker girls wore blue-evening-light dresses and danced in a circle speaking of the widow they had neglected. We went to the website of all acts of poetry, a huge screen at the very edge of the room, a bit basement, that seemed to grow little by little (would it overwhelm the scene?) when you pointed out to the dawn on the rightside horizon & my eyelashes made a shadow I could see. Will the screen engulf the world
will the web?
was the widow their window?
what is an act of poetry?
Catching the light
with the side
of my eye.
the horse says neigh
the human says yeay
a grasshopper, you said
will never be sad.
That’s the first thing.
I WISH YOU a tidy sum of pleasures
say, the syllables of a wolf and their continentally changing vowel and stress; such treasures —
but how should we distribute them across the days?
as an army of armadillos tumbling
in sunlight ten thousand
happinesses pluraled up heaped and wait upon you the surplus
when the total of pain is subtracted from pleasure (Bain)
the wery hunter to fynd his happy prey OR Any happy concourse of Atoms
He…Weenes yet at last to make a happie hande By bloudie warre (Gascoigne)
in the felled light find you
the happy set of liberty, plenty, and letters (Middleton)
Hip me how. Harmony me
bouncing in the noontime
swoon
when sun
won
all we ever wanted to win honey
suspended in the aspirated day honey Have we achieved
the greatest happiness of the greatest number (Hutcheson) the exultant position of the new loveron the hook of the h just as it leaves the body
Ha
Ha
coughs it
laughs it
ha
ppy
and soyou happy
round as a berry
or a bug the color happy
hanging on a branch in blue you
haul happy around
like a log
TRY to-
day to
make the greater part Oh
Happiness! Our being’s end and aim! Good, Pleasure, Ease, Content! Whate’er
thy name! (Pope) Suddenly
there was a trapyears and running, it was
The American Way. The prolific birds
gulp grain in the neighbor’s nonspecific yard
& know nothing of it, though the neighbor
who puts seeds in the feeder is scientifically
American. To be
looking past leafless scraggly-ass
branches across an autistic low chain-
link fence prettied up with lattice & into
a strategic American yard? There is war there. And a cherry tree. May I claim
on our small (›1/4 acre) lot another hieroglyphic
territory? Make a different
happiness list? There is nothing
to be done about the anachronistic power lines,
the metal chimneys pointing out of roofs like turbine
erections, the 7 billion humans. Take a lesson
from the squirrels. They never give
up being squirrels. About the drug blimps, the dust road smoothed
each night looking for immigrant footprints. About the war dead and the dark. Have a
little dark or
have a little dog (Palace) Have a little squirrel
or have a little twirl (Scarlata remix). If I can’t occupy America
where can I teach
specific felicific calculus
it has come to me to speak
happiness
come to me
when I speak of the world
terrific
happinesse that often madnesse hits
I HAD TAKEN THE LONG WAY home.
As in a dream a woman chasing another
woman cannot reach her, nor can the woman in flight
escape her pursuer, so I never
seem to arrive home happy
could not overtake
nor could I pull it away, happy or grief stuck to the heart or the face
When the great Master of Pursuit
Death and when
And when sleep came
brimful of happiness, in a soft bed
As in a dream a woman chasing another
cannot reach, so
the mind rushing over life
was trying to feel where the soul was—
base of the skull / top of the neck—no—
that’s just a knot of tense muscle—a
twisted bone. I take
a twisted bone for home. Take it home. I polish it.
We are a truth for life’s fracking. I guess. I caress.
Howl is short for how to say what’s (long i) live what’s glow
Blest beyond earth’s howling bliss.
BEAUTY ROLLING AROUND in the dust an incandescence between what
wanders around among coming to be and decay it’s only human it’s like the children’s riddle about the eunuch who threw
something at a bat:
A happiness that is not happy throws a shoe that is not a shoe out the window (not a window) toward the moon (not a moon)
till the echo between moon and not moon made its own mooing called song
so with so many bigs and smalls and lights and heavies we describe
our happy, our pain
Apply these names in accordance with the beasts
what it enjoys good
what angers it bad
You are the beast, be
Happy
Eleni Sikelianos is most recently the author of The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead (Coffee House Press, 2013). The recipient of numerous honor and awards, she directs the the creative writing program at the University of Denver.