ATTITUDE OF LION

I.

One leaned his beautiful face against the wrought-iron cage and

               Did not give in.

II.

When he was mythic, they combed the mane of him

In the shapes

               Of spruce lutes from a middle century.

He is still an immortelle,

                         Yellow, numbed, and numinous.

III.

               Home is the curdled theater where I’m safe.

IV.

He was the smallest in the litter, the mackerel tabby found

By me at the radiator’s silver foot, but he was dormant, cold.

Thus began the business about “the Hair,” etc., the suicides—

V.

Sejant, I was implacable at the hill’s crest not willing

    To go down. The needle and its kind of mercy

Then the tumbling from the furrowed height

VI.

               Into the Dutch elm leaves, a racket of lace,

Then rolling on the wood cart with the cloud-blue wooden wheels, away.

               Couchant, you could stand for a King.

VII.

Your kind, in the oldest British Empire, held up your claws

But you did not roar, not rampantly.

On which continent do your antelopes live still, somewhere grazing

Elegant on red-oat and acacia grass,

VIII.

                         Puffed up so as not to look so slender

Or too frail to the more salient hunters of your kind.

I am like you, eyes closed, head low, resting on forepaws as if

                                        In sleep, as if asleep.