Animal Poem in which the Animal Doesn’t Die, 1
- Aug 23, 2024
- 2 min read
by Candace Walsh
with gratitude to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty”
All tortoises look ancient, even this baby one, wizened face looking back. Paused in his glacial-pace crossing of a road more often met with deer hooves, squirrel paws, turkey vulture talons, and my shoes than tires. Angled unwisely, taking the longest-fraught distance between two points of roadside wildgrass.
I paused, stilled by his peril. Who would ever look at him and think soup or barrette. Force field rilling between us. I kept walking. Maybe my keratin fingernails quailed beside his keratin eminence. I worried the dogs would lunge as I bent. And he didn’t want my touch.
When the guy driving a sand-gold truck approached, I flagged him down to tell him to watch out.
On my return, the tortoise was still in the road. Maybe a dreamer hypnotized by the gravel composite mosaic. Maybe wanted to follow the truck; be one when he grows up. Maybe an orphan. Maybe the dumb one.
I wound the double dog leash tight and made my dogs sit, then flashed a promise treat. With my other hand I cupped the tortoise shell and lifted, as he pulled in his head. Their shells have nerve endings. Not like sea shells; so like sea shells.
We crossed, I briefly a goddess with hands ending in beasts: two tamed but only-as-good-as-their-opportunities shelter dogs, and one wild animated gourd, its shell dappled with Van Gogh suns. (In one of the suns was a dinosaur silhouette.) I placed him down eider-soft. Gave the dogs their treats. Praised them. We are always / only / ever / rescuing ourselves.
Candace Walsh holds a PhD in creative writing (fiction) from Ohio University. Her poetry chapbook, Iridescent Pigeons, is forthcoming from Yellow Arrow Publishing July 9, 2024. She will be the visiting professor of English (creative writing and literature) at Ohio University during the coming academic year. She holds an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College. Recent/forthcoming publication credits include California Quarterly, Sinister Wisdom, Vagabond City Lit, and HAD (poetry); March Danceness, New Limestone Review, and Pigeon Pages (creative nonfiction); and The Greensboro Review, Passengers Journal, and Leon Literary Review (fiction). Her craft and pedagogical essays and book reviews have appeared in Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Brevity, Craft Literary, descant, and Fiction Writers Review. At Ohio University, she co-edited Quarter After Eight literary journal for three years, founded and produced the QAE Reading Series, and coordinated the English department’s Visiting Writers program.
