Oh, I write a lot of poems about beavers.
I'm not sure why.
I guess in Walt Disney films, they always look so cute.
Yeah, maybe that's it.
We hear stories when you're a kid that they
can signal to one another with their tails and tell stories
or whatever, and I suppose that sticks with you.
So here's one somewhat mythological poem
about beavers.
"The police are driving around stern after their disorganized
childhoods arresting people for bad posture;
with their passkeys they slip into houses
as they're moved, having heard some snatch of Gounod, an idea
by Kirwan on the radio to stand incensed, hands on hips
staring over the shoulder of a housewife
unawares shredding carrots on a greater into a bowl, making
salad with raisins in it cut on the soles of shoes.
They think of it as the burning trash dump outside of town.
The legs of ballet dancers having striven earnestly,
having told mostly the truth all their lives,
eyes desperately blue dots of paint slipping ignominiously
into their kind of hell.
Nevertheless, when her husband comes home he likes it;
it is enough to keep them going the next day.
Meanwhile over in the next valley where the beaver
haven't been for years, it's like a movie, a miracle;
the beaver are back again damming, backing up the river,
sitting on their fat haunches, lining the levees,
eating poplar twigs, looking as cute as I think they are,
scanning the sky blank-eyed, remembering their catalogue
raisonné, but gazed at by the frontiersman,
who has just now arrived, just now parting the tules,
a pharaoh not yet converted, a weary miner just leaving his
mine as they contemplate one day getting rich,
spreading out over the plains, becoming buffalo".
There is-- they're related, aren't they,
beaver and buffalo?