Hippopotamus
The red cavern that confronts me
could be the fiery furnace
Nebuchadnezzar decreed
for Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego
who refused to kneel to his gold image.
But who could walk unharmed
in this place? The tusks planted
on either side of the tongue’s
slowly rising plain would spear
ribs, enter the heart. The teeth,
those accordion pleats lining
the lid slanting towards the sky,
would crunch up bones.
If I was housed in a hippopotamus
I’d need video cameras
to keep track of events
going on in my mouth, a phone
so that I could ring down
to my stomach to ask if it is hungry.
I imagine myself sending
e-mails to each of my four
short legs giving them instructions
to stand at the same moment.
Sex would be an operation
involving leverage and balance -
forget those physics experiments
in the second year with bars,
metal weights and sniggered love.
Excitement would drain away
long before the conjunction of bodies.
I doubt I could bear my six tons,
my crude shape, my hide
unrelieved by stripes, spots,
any speck of loveliness -
though to the hippo eye huge
is the norm and humans
must seem puny specimens
with tiny heads, twitching bodies.
But here is the river slow,
rippled, irresistible. Submerged
in its own domain this horse
is nymph-green, bounds lightly
over the stones on the shallow bed,
dances by weeds with dark fingers
and spread hairs. How I want
to feel the river’s silks
on my soles, lie on a bank
in the sultry still of afternoon.
be one of the breathing mounds
coated with silvergrey mud
that cools the savage heat,
dream the nag of time is lost
in the slippage beneath me.
Page(s) 21-22
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