`They Don't Talk Human Language'

We spent the afternoon chopping, sawing and digging. After years of laziness and indecision, we cleared vines and brush from the side of the house, including a bougainvillea covered with long woody thorns -- insidiously Dantean flora. I sawed it down, Sylvia dug up the dense ball of roots. The resulting scratches make my hands, arms and ass (don’t ask) look like a road map to nowhere. We filled 15 large trash bags with biomass, with another heap yet to bag.

Before I commenced sawing, I saw something in the tangled branches of the bougainvillea -- a three-foot garter snake, thumb-thick at his thickest, perched horizontally, about face-high, among the thorns. Before picking him up to show the boys, I stared, nose-to-nose, into his eyes, wondering, as always, what animals perceive when they sense our presence – probably heat patterns in the case of a snake. If I had to anthropomorphize his reaction, I’d call it clinical and unalarmed. I pulled him from the bush and he shit on my jeans – green-and-white, mayonnaise-like stuff with a stink I remember from childhood.

Les Murray is one the great chroniclers or animators of the natural world. His strengths are hawk-like acuity of vision, empathy for non-human species and his gift for doing anything with language. In 1992 he published an extraordinary volume, Translations from the Natural World. Many of the poems are not about animals so much as by them. The poems are told from the animal’s point of view without descending into bathos. I can think of fiction narrated by animals, by James Agee, John Hawkes and John Berger, and all of it is embarrassingly awful. Here, in contrast, are lines from Murray‘s “Two Dogs”:

“Enchantment creek under bank pollen, are the stiff scents he makes,
hot grass rolling and rabbit-dig but only saliva chickweed.
Road pizza clay bird, hers answer him, rot-spiced good.”

The dogs, as dogs do, speak in smells. Murray gives us a blunt sensory inventory of the canine world, pushing his language to the point where it resembles so-called Language Poetry, minus the nihilism and incoherence. Murray’s biographer, Peter F. Alexander, reproduces a portion of a 1990 letter the poet wrote while writing the animal poems:

“It successively touches the lives of many animals, birds, even plants and insects and fish, sometimes giving a sense of their life from the outside, more often by pretending to translate their `speech’ -- living things do all talk, I say, but they don’t talk human language, or always speak with their mouth. I’m trying to be neither Walt Disney nor Ted Hughes, and enjoying the constraints: no hands, no colour vision if they’re mammals…not much metaphor or sense of time, no consequences, no mercy, but no vindictiveness either.”

Here is “The Snake’s Heat Organ”:

“Earth after sun is slow burn
An eye scales darken.
Water’s no burn.
Smaller sunlives all dim slowly
to predawn invisibility
but self-digesters constantly glow-burn.
Their blood-coals fleet
glimmering as I spin
lightly over textures.
Passenger of my passage
I reach round upright leaf-burners, I
reach and follow under rock balances,
I gather at the drinking margin.
Across the nothing there
an ardency
is lapping blank, which segments serially up
beneath the coruscating braincakes
into the body,
three skin-sheddings’ length of no-burn negatively
coiled in a guttering chamber:
a fox,
it is pedaling off now,
a scintillating melon,
gamboge in its hull
round a dark seed center
And hungry as the sun.”

The other writer so gifted with empathy for animals, able to project himself into their being, is Thoreau. He envies other species. In his journal, on April 16, 1852, he gives an extended description of his encounter with the first woodchuck of the season. He follows the creature across a field and sits down next to him. Read the entire passage, but here‘s a Murray-like sample:

“I sat down by his side within a foot. I talked to him quasi forest lingo, baby talk, at any rate in a conciliatory tone, and thought that I had some influence on him. He gritted his teeth less.”