animals – Page 33 – don't confuse the narrator

moving experiences I

It’s a while since I posted any poetry, so, since I’m in the process of moving things from the city to the village, this seems appropriate:

PACKING

The rip and fart of parcel tape; the tangle,
stick and cuss; the smell of dust,
mothballs and corrugated cardboard.
Drugstore detergent cartons
stuffed and trussed
and stacked in the spare room.
Both cats in heat and looking
for a mate, a nest, a fond caress…
They play at pigs in pokes, scrabble,
scratch and snag at boxes, plastic bags
and bundles, wail and waul.

When finally I move, I’ll leave
fixtures and fittings
and two grown kittens.

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where the bee sucks

Carpenter bee on sunflower — not your traditional bumble bee

The flower is one of my favourites: in Spanish it’s a girasol – which neatly translates to “turnsole” in English, though we know them more commonly as sunflowers.
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a lizard’s tale

I was out on the verandah talking on the phone when I saw a tiny lizard. “Ooh, ¡qué lindo!, ¡un lagartijo pequeñísimo!” I exclaimed, or something equally inane.

The friend I was speaking to was quick to reply, “But clearly not that small, or you wouldn’t know that it was male!”

Lizards at Montsegur, France — French lizards of unspecified sex

He was, of course, making fun of my Spanish and the fact that I’d got the gender wrong.
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Well, no, of course, it isn’t the pigs themselves who are lying, and I should probably feel guilty about adding to their bad press, but pigs have had plenty of air-time already on this blog and at least this time the post is about humans dying, not – at least not directly – about pigs being slaughtered.

Looking around the web, swine ‘flu is causing all sorts of reactions, from panic, to ridicule. It’s clearly thought to be important by many, as this screen shot from the BBC site indicates:

a purple cow

The Madrid Cow Parade cows were auctioned last night.

"Mi sueño". Artist - C A Gonzalez — ...I'd rather see than be one!

I have many pictures of the stampede as they were lined up in the street outside the Westin Palace Hotel, but no time to pick, choose and process, so will settle for this one for the moment:

Mi Sueño (“my dream”) by Carlos A González, sponsored by alimentacion.es.

And a few brief words from Gelett Burgess (1866–1951):