Why do you keep putting animals in your poems?

I open windows to catch a glimpse of grace
on the horizon, and in they sneak, coyotes and crows,
pikas and the scholarly vole, dragging scoured skies
I can see myself in. Much cheaper than booking
a flight to the Galapagos. And they teach me.

Badgers rarely invent stories to make them sad
about their bodies. And the wrinkliest of Shar Peis
never dreams of ironing its face. My happiness
is like a flock of sparrows that scatters when a bus
drives by, then re-strings itself two blocks away,
 
a necklace of chirps festooning a caved-in barn.
Capuchin monkeys will bite a millipede to release
a narcotic toxin, then pass the millipede to a neighbor
as if it were a joint at a concert. In a Rhode Island
nursing home, Oscar the miracle cat curls up

with residents hours before they expire, converting
death into purrs for the next world. A poem is a grave
and nursery: the more creatures you bury in one place,
the more hunger bursts forth somewhere else,
like bats at Carlsbad when the brightest day turns dark.

The night I stood on my sister's feet and learned
to waltz, a porcupine braved four lanes of asphalt
and hurtling machines to chomp our windfall apples--
two miracles of syncopation held together by a harvest
moon. As Marianne Moore taught us, an hour

at the Bronx Zoo in a tricorn hat leaves one happier
than nine months with a shrink. Comes a time
you just have to wiggle your pin feathers,
wag your ghost tail, feel your teeth grow long
for the ragged salmon throwing their bodies upstream.

- Lance Larsen