Carrying bee bread, a healing
exudate from wounded plants,
the western honey bee in morning lows
passes through small flight holes
around each hanging combsheet
to a deeper part of the hive.
The crocodile, basking in the sun,
with jaws open, swallows stones,
but not the crocodile-bird spinning near.
A kneeling stag with distorted antlers
dies behind a friendly thornbush,
a lioness crouches among bronze leaves.
To be gifts, a border of walking lions
looks straight ahead in a guardian pose.
A gold and lapis lazuli ram is caught
on a tree where tiny silver frogs
play with lion pins. A team of four overlapping
yellow-glazed horses paws the raw evenings.
A camel with translucent eyelids
breathes the dead airspace next its skin,
exhaled veins returning to the heart.
A leaf is arrayed across the face
of a leaf-nosed bat, or nose-leaf bat,
the notch-eared, long-fingered, tomb or horseshoe bat.
When the moon dives, the moonfish, pufferfish,
spade fish, triggerfish and the upside down
catfish run after her like puppies.
Then a living blizzard of birds overflies:
the rose finch, shining sunbird,
the brown fish owl and the red-eyed dove,
the spectacled, Orphean warbler,
the mourning wheatear and the laughing thrush,
the dusky eyebrowed thrush, the rubythroat,
the slaty-headed parakeet, the sooty gull,
the plaintive cuckoo, the harlequin quail,
the see-see partridge and the ruddy shelduck;
the honey buzzard, the dark chanting goshawk,
the comb duck, the cotton pygmy goose,
the bean goose, the common goldeneye,
the shy albatross, the sociable lapwing,
the whale-headed stork, not the false killer whale,
the pond heron, the Indian blue robin …
Their airy eddies scatter juniper
for six miles of tongue-patterned serpents,
and Isabella gazelles, and marbled polecats,
and monk seals and harbour porpoises,
and naked-soled gerbils, and midday gerbils,
and click beetles and jewel beetles;
for the black-lipped pika and the white-toothed shrew,
for the junglefowl, the hinny or mule,
for the plain tiger butterfly and the mouse-like dormouse,
and the daughter the snake obtained by prayer
that was killed by a falling star, around the eye,
partly by the sure-lined way she holds her body,
partly by the ribbing on the wings she has acquired.