1. The Sloth at Evening

I'm fond of animals but in
a condescending way:

collect them, little wood
and pottery tokens of them,
keep them on shelves,

and rope them into jokes
and small grotesqueries.

The sloth at evening
drowsily notes the trees,

how they take their nourishment
from the wormy sky, and feather
the birded ground. All's well.

My words aren't predators
or forest fires, I tell myself. I keep

an aardvark too: my varnished,
polished, russet pear with legs,
brown bottle with a face.

2. Creatures of the Burgess Shale

The little delicate corpses
of the creatures of the Burgess Shale
they have exhumed, and named.

Wiwaxia corrugata, tiny
spiny nut, diminutive dodo
of the ocean sediment;

Dinomischus isolatus,
solitary crocus, animal-flower;

and dream-inducing, rare
Hallucigenia sparsa:

numerous once, oh maybe
even for an epoch. Pioneers
of failure to adapt, they couldn't know
how beautiful they were, or see
the world would have no use for them.

How soon the extinction
of the beautiful misfits

- the knowing animals too, those poor
Neanderthals, arthritic, stumbling beasts
of memory and intellect; Tasmanians; Caribs;
Carthaginians after the Roman feast:

mouse-people, once self-named, now
falsely named, they too must be unearthed.

Mouse-people born for the hawk, they
would have known that they were beautiful.