My mother-- preferring the strange to the tame: <br />Dove-note, bone marrow, deer dung, <br />Frog's belly distended with finny young, <br />Leaf-mould wilderness, hare-bell, toadstool, <br />Odd, small snakes loving through the leaves, <br />Metallic beetles rambling over stones: all <br />Wild and natural -flashed out her instinctive love, <br />and quick, she <br />Picked up the fluttering. bleeding bat the cat laid at her feet, <br />And held the little horror to the mirror, where <br />He gazed on himself and shrieked like an old screen door <br />far off. <br /> <br />Depended from her pinched thumb, each wing <br />Came clattering down like a small black shutter. <br />Still tranquil, she began, "It's rather sweet..." <br />The soft mouse body, the hard feral glint <br />In the caught eyes. Then we saw <br />And recoiled: lice, pallid, yellow, <br />Nested within the wing-pits, cozily sucked and snoozed, <br />The thing dropped from her hands, and with its thud, <br />Swiftly, the cat with a clean careful mouth <br />Closed on the soiled webs, growling, took them out to the back stoop. <br /> <br />But still, dark blood, a sticky puddle on the floor <br />Remained, of all my my mother's tender, wounding passion <br />For a whole wild, lost, betrayed and secret life <br />Among its dens and burrows, its clean stones, <br />Whose denizens can turn upon the world <br />With spitting tongue, an odor, talon, claw <br />To sting or soil benevolence, alien <br />As our clumsy traps, our random scatter of shot, <br />She swept to the kitchen. Turning on the tap, <br />She washed and washed the pity from her hands.<br /><br />Carolyn Kizer<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-intruder/
