Welcome to Poetically Yours. This segment showcases poems by northern Illinois poets. This week’s featured artist is Veronica Noechel.
Noechel is dedicated to animal rescue. She’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has received generous support from North Carolina Arts Council, the Vermont Studio Center, Headlands Center for the Arts, United Arts Council, The Culture and Animals Foundation, and I-Park.
Here’s Noechel’s poem “Letter From a Dead Baboon.”
Somewhere, in an office full of mahogany and the stilled breath of beasts, where the walls are paneled in tigers’ stripes, I am crouched for the kill never to pounce. All potential, never kinetic, the death in my bones holds me back. I am permanently stuck midair, behind an architecturally orchestrated oaken pretend. I am still swinging an airborne fist, dangerously unbalanced, under the weight of a life swiped away like sawdust and stuffed inside a lie.
A chubby plastic form just a couple sizes bigger than reality. Then again,
it’s so long since I’ve eaten, I might be forgetting my own mass.
Inside this fur that feels like the fuzz in an artichoke’s heart instead of death and chemistry, I feel sickly owned, admired
like a dead geode, rendered harmless and impotent. Something a child
might take to show and tell, if only I was more conveniently compact like the coyote over there, emptied out and folded four times,
stored like a tea cozy. A placemat. A letter without an envelope.
In this place, I am just a banana-crazy ape, and they perform this low slung, hooting dance right in front of my stiff, angry corpse
when the whim takes them and I am forced to watch, frozen just an arm-swipe away, forever stuck in this second before
the strike. In less than a second I could lift them with one leather black hand
and swing them in for the bite, face-to-face.
We know to rip the nose off first when territory is insulted.
The high sharp smell of urine, it could be so easy if I wasn’t dead.
It can’t really be that samsara ends here
in a wood paneled square, scented of death and cigars. It can’t.
A wild dog’s head hangs so close, his whiskers brush my ear in solidarity. The torment of frozen time lingers in the gut of every one of us forced to watch the world go on through cloudy glass eyes. In the darkness of early morning, what’s left of us rumbles deep as the chant of a monk dressed in dull gold and rich red, a groan so heavy in our dusty stomachs, you could almost blame it on settling boards, or the approach of the truck that eats garbage. It’s so low you don’t hear it. You feel it. Still a growl, though silent. Outside the dogs, penned between hunts, feel it rise from the dirt below their pacing paws. One hound howls releasing his fear to the sky. The cold morning air carries the thin, shrill whines of dead coyotes forever snarling below me. Their ultrasonic songs braid together in a plait of pain that rises up and carries and when the snow muffles all the other sounds of morning the neighbor’s Rottweiler hears and releases his fear to the ground in an expanding pool of warm urine.
The serval killed for his spots, the tawny pajama soft cat for his mane, and merry piper squirrel for his bones, cast before us amid buck horns that still smell of fledgling virility,
like long pianist fingers or the knobby knees
of a junior high school lothario. We are stolen. Excised, and yet held, still between individual hairs, the hackles that silently rise. We are a dead forest. We are an empty desert, with a noise so constant you may forget to hear it but it’s there in the wind exchanged between grains of sand like money slips between men.
Listen for the wolf who still whines for his pack
as the quetzal screams through his beak, forever glued.
His bones ache for flight they were built to know like breathing.
It’s shared by the flying fox hanging forever upside down.
If they bothered to look, they could see the desperate quiver of his wings, pterodactyl like in their enormous miniature, vibrating so quickly it’s nearly invisible.
A lopsided raccoon preys and prays to the father of earth and the mother of time, to our sister water who cries from the sky to brother wood who keeps his siblings’ secrets, to the metal, threaded through the ground, that carries our messages between them, to any god who will listen. He wants only the return of the ear that was disintegrated by the twitch of an index finger and an explosive sound as big as a falling tree.
I want to apologize to that sad raccoon. His name means “before-dog”. He hasn’t even arrived and already he’s gone. It’s all I can offer, an apology that’s not even mine to give.
A spray of Bactine on a world shot in two.
I’m sorry you were chased by foamy snapping mouths. I’m sorry you were forced to climb
a tree that would betray you with a bend.
I’m sorry that you smelled the fruit of distillation and the high shrill scent of sweat held by clothing.
I’m sorry that the last thing you heard was their laughter.
The one-eared before-dog can only groan his dead sad song high into the cold morning air, frozen forever in a stupid pose atop a wormy log. The man’s little dog, the one allowed inside, hears this cry and sings it back to him
whenever he’s allowed in the room. His master
laughs at him for being afraid of dead things
and knocks the raccoon on its side to illustrate his stiff helplessness.
The song rises an octave--an ultrasonic squeal that makes the mice in the walls wail. One day he will do this when the air is cold enough for the hounds outside to hear.
One day, in his hunting clothes, the man will open their cages and whistle them to the truck, and one day that whistle will sound
less like a command and more like a memory from somewhere deep within their own
beginnings, a twisted curling wail that rides a double helix through their ancestry
and that day, the man will be taken down. Then we will wonder if we can take down one, can we not fell them all?
