. . . at times he shows us what the bull felt, what the dog thought, what the horse was imagining.
—Constantine Leontiev, commenting on Tolstoy
The Bull
The bull pities Ivan Ilyich and the man
who did not know how much land a man needs,
but is perplexed by all those Russian names
as he is when cowboys sing about dogies
or when the steers make jokes about bulldozers.
Eyeing the steers, the bull feels superior, cocky,
pizzle-ready for any teat-heavy, cudsy cow,
yet doubtful when he contemplates Leviticus,
Bulfinch’s Mythology, or his place in history;
vaguely ashamed when passing the china shop.
The bull loathes Kansas City, Chicago, Spain,
grows anxious when children climb the fence
and threaten to enter his grassy domain,
approves of bully pulpits and bully boys,
Picasso, Merrill Lynch, Noah and his ark.
The Dog
The dog thinks War and Peace is bull,
prefers Charles Dickens and the slighter works of
Thomas Mann, thinks all thought
about what dogs might think is “bosh”
(such is the dog’s way with a phrase).
When not absorbed with the Russians,
the dog thinks mostly about squirrels,
beef bones and strangers passing by,
his stuffed frog, closed doors, and how
the sunlight moves all day up the stairs.
In a brown study whose burden is fetching,
the dog suddenly entertains a new thought—treats!
how he dances for them at night, and how,
if on the sunless stairs he found us dead,
he’d bark until hoarse, then eat us raw.
The Horse
The horse doggedly imagines the most usual things—
pastures, steppes, Cossacks and cowboys,
Charlemagne, Custer, Crazy Horse, broughams
and Conestoga wagons, Silver and Trigger,
war upon war and furrow after furrow.
Glued to his imaginings, the horse improvises
the difference between “Turgenev” and “turgescent,”
imagines hack work giving one a charley horse,
fancies entertaining rumpy Anna Karenina,
the handsome Vronsky, along the Chisholm Trail.
Wondering what it must be like to be man’s
best friend, to be cannonaded or gored, one horse
strays into a dream of a terrified small girl who,
clinging to his sunny mane, rides his ample back
bravely in slow circles all the way to joy.