BESTIARY

If only I could speak with birds,
with oysters and with small lizards,
with the foxes of Selva Oscura,
with representative penguins,
if the sheep would listen to me,
the languorous, woolly dogs,
the huge carriage-horses, if only
I could talk things over with the cats,
if the chickens could understand me!

I have never felt the urge to speak
with aristocratic animals:
I am not at all interested
in the world view of the wasps
or the opinions of thoroughbred horses:
so what, if they go on flying
or winning ribbons at the track!
I want to speak with the flies,
with the bitch who has just given birth,
to have a long chat with the snakes.

When my feet were able to walk
through triple nights, now past,
I followed the nocturnal dogs,
those squalid, incessant travelers
who trot around town in silence
in their great rush to nowhere,
and I followed them for hours,
they were quite suspicious of me,
those poor foolish dogs,
they lost the opportunity
of telling me their sorrows,
of running with grief and a tail
through the avenues of the ghosts.

I was always very curious
about the erotic rabbit:
who provokes it and whispers
into its genital ears?
It never stops procreating
and takes no notice of Saint Francis,
doesn't listen to nonsense:
the rabbit keeps on humping
with its inexhaustible mechanism.
I'd like to speak with the rabbit,
I love its sexy customs.

The spiders have always been slandered
in the idiotic pages
of exasperating simplifiers
who take the fly's point of view,
who describe them as devouring,
carnal, unfaithful, lascivious.
For me, that reputation
discredits just those who concocted it:
the spider is an engineer,
a divine maker of watches,
for one fly more or less
let the imbeciles detest them,
I want to have a talk with the spider,
I want her to weave me a star.

The fleas interest me so much
that I let them bite me for hours,
they are perfect, ancient, Sanskritic,
they are inexorable machines.
They don't bite in order to eat,
they bite in order to jump,
they're the globe's champion highjumpers,
the smoothest and most profound
acrobats in the circus:
let them gallop across my skin,
let them reveal their emotions
and amuse themselves with my blood,
just let me be introduced to them,
I want to know them from up close,
I want to know what I can count on.

With the ruminants I haven't been able
to achieve an intimate friendship:
I myself am a ruminant, I can't see
why they don't understand me.
I'll have to study this theme
grazing with cows and oxen,
making plans with the bulls.
Somehow I will come to know
so many intestinal things
hidden inside my body
like the most clandestine passions.

What do pigs think of the dawn?
They don't sing but they carry it
with their large pink bodies,
with their little hard hoofs.

The pigs carry the dawn.

The birds eat up the night.

And in the morning the world
is deserted: the spiders sleep,
the humans, the dogs, the wind sleeps,
the pigs grunt, and day breaks.

I want to have a talk with the pigs.

Sweet, loud, harsh-voiced frogs,
I have always wanted to be
a frog, I have loved the pools
and the leaves, thin as filaments,
the green world of the watercress
with the frogs, queens of the sky.

The serenade of the frog
rises in my dream and excites it,
rises like a climbing vine
to the balconies of my childhood,
to the budding nipples of my cousin,
to the astronomic jasmine
of the black night of the South,
and now so much time has passed,
don't ask me about the sky:
I feel that I haven't yet learned
the harsh-voiced idiom of the frogs.

If this is so, how am I a poet?
What do I know of the multiplied
geography of the night?

In this world that rushes and grows calm
I want more communications,
other languages, other signs,
to be intimate with this world.

Everyone has remained content
with the sinister presentations
of rapid capitalists
and systematic women.
I want to speak with many things
and I won't leave this planet
without knowing what I came to find,
without resolving this matter,
and people are not enough,
I have to go much farther
and I have to get much closer.

And so, gentlemen, I'm going
to have a talk with a horse,
let the poetess excuse me
and let the professor pardon me,
all week I'll be busy,
I have to constantly listen.
What was the name of that cat?