Marianne Moore - The Jerboa lyrics

Too Much A Roman had an artist, a freedman, contrive a cone — pine-cone or fir-cone — with holes for a fountain. Placed on the Prison of St. Angelo, this cone of the Pompeys which is known now as the Popes', pa**ed for art. A huge cast bronze, dwarfing the peaco*k statue in the garden of the Vatican, it looks like a work of art made to give to a Pompey, or native of Thebes. Others could build, and understood making colossi and how to use slaves, and kept crocodiles and put baboons on the necks of giraffes to pick fruit, and used serpent magic. They had their men tie hippopotami and bring out dappled dog- cats to course antelopes, dikdik, and ibex; or used small eagles. They looked on as theirs, impalas and onigers, the wild ostrich herd with hard feet and bird necks rearing back in the dust like a serpent preparing to strike, cranes, mongooses, storks, anoas, Nile geese; and there were gardens for these — combining planes, dates, limes, and pomegranates, in avenues — with square pools of pink flowers, tame fish, and small frogs. Besides yarns dyed with indigo, and red cotton, they had a flax which they spun into fine linen cordage for yachtsmen. These people liked small things; they gave to boys little paired playthings such as nests of eggs, ichneumon and snake, paddle and raft, badger and camel; and made toys for them- selves: the royal totem; and toilet-boxes marked with the contents. Lords and ladies put goose-grease paint in round bone boxes — the pivoting lid incised with a duck-wing or reverted duck- head; kept in a buck or rhinoceros horn, the ground horn; and locust oil in stone locusts. It was a picture with a fine distance; of drought, and of a**istance in time, from the Nile rising slowly, while the pig-tailed monkey on slab-hands, with arched-up slack-slung gait, and the brown dandy looked at the jasmine two-leafed twig and bud, cactus-pads, and fig. Dwarfs here and there, lent to an evident poetry of frog grays, duck-egg greens, and egg-plant blues, a fantasy and a verisimilitude that were right to those with, everywhere, power over the poor. The bees' food is your food. Those who tended flower- beds and stables were like the king's cane in the form of a hand, or the folding bedroom made for his mother of whom he was fond. Princes clad in queens' dresses, calla or petunia white, that trembled at the edge, and queens in a king's underskirt of fine-twilled thread like silk- worm gut, as bee-man and milk- maid, kept divine cows and bees; limestone brows, and gold-foil wings. They made basalt serpents and portraits of beetles; the king gave his name to them and he was named for them. He feared snakes, and tamed Pharaoh's rat, the rust- backed mongoose. No bust of it was made, but there was pleasure for the rat. Its restlessness was its excellence; it was praised for its wit; and the jerboa, like it, a small desert rat, and not famous, that lives without water, has happiness. Abroad seeking food, or at home in its burrow, the Sahara field-mouse has a shining silver house of sand. O rest and joy, the boundless sand, the stupendous sand-spout, no water, no palm-trees, no ivory bed, tiny cactus; but one would not be he who has nothing but plenty. Abundance African*s meant the conqueror sent from Rome. It should mean the untouched: the sand-brown jumping-rat — free-born; and the blacks, that choice race with an elegance ignored by one's ignorance. Part terrestrial, and part celestial, Jacob saw, cudgel staff in claw-hand — steps of air and air angels; his friends were the stones. The translucent mistake of the desert, does not make hardship for one who can rest and then do the opposite — launching as if on wings, from its match-thin hind legs, in daytime or at night; with the tail as a weight, undulated out by speed, straight. Looked at by daylight, the underside's white, though the fur on the back is buff-brown like the breast of the fawn-breasted bower-bird. It hops like the fawn-breast, but has chipmunk contours — perceived as it turns its bird head — the nap directed neatly back and blending with the ear which reiterates the slimness of the body. The fine hairs on the tail, repeating the other pale markings, lengthen until at the tip they fill out in a tuft — black and white; strange detail of the simplified creature, fish-shaped and silvered to steel by the force of the large desert moon. Course the jerboa, or plunder its food store, and you will be cursed. It honors the sand by a**uming its color; closed upper paws seeming one with the fur in its flight from a danger. By fifths and sevenths, in leaps of two lengths, like the uneven notes of the Bedouin flute, it stops its gleaning on little wheel castors, and makes fern-seed foot-prints with kangaroo speed. Its leaps should be set to the flageolet; pillar body erect on a three-cornered smooth-working Chippendale claw — propped on hind legs, and tail as third toe, between leaps to its burrow.