These poems are adapted from an art book I made awhile back. My process was to make quick little watercolor "sketches" (without thinking too much, kind of like a visual art version of free writing), and then choose the ones I liked best to put into the book. Then I wrote a poem for each picture.

Although the images are pretty similar to others I painted at the time, representational but also with abstract and gestural elements, the poems are a bit different from my usual writing, a little more abstract, surreal, and dreamlike.

ANIMALS

TIGER'S EYE

Animal magnetism. Animal passion. Dog eat dog. Dog in heat.

Cat's pajamas. Cat's cradle. Cat's eye. Cat got your tongue?

Hair of the dog that bit you?

It's raining cats and dogs.

Cool cats. Hot dogs.

Swing a cat. Going to the dogs. On a hot tin roof.

Curiosity killed it.

Dog star. Dog days of summer. Man's best friend. Sick as a dog.

Sly fox. Mother hen. Tortoise and hare. Ant and cricket.

Pick up some chicks.

Who's the fox!?!

Such a dog.

Big bad wolf.

Catfish. Kittenfish.

Dragonfly. Dragonbreath.

Dogbreath. Eagle eye.

Wise old owl. Wicked snake.

Elephant graveyard.

Bear hug.

Bullshit.

It sheds its skin.

It rises from the ashes.

It never forgets.

Laws of nature. Circle of life. Survival of the fittest.

King of the jungle. Might makes right. Top of the food chain.

Bottom

of the food chain.

Feeds on death. Eats its young. Eats its mother. Bambi's mother.

Garden of Eden. Lion and lamb. Heaven on Earth. Noble savage.

On Christmas Eve.

Heathen. State of grace. Animism. Anthropomorphism.

Animus. Anima. Animal.

Concrete jungle. Cannibals.

If animals could talk?

"Those people are animals".

FISH EYES

Fish live underwater.
The atmosphere they breathe
is much denser than ours
but fish
themselves
are not.
The substance of a fish
is almost lost in its surroundings.
The water of its flesh and blood
flows
with just enough pressure
to meet that
of the deep
deep water.

POLAR BEAR

A polar bear should be obvious
but it’s as powerfully inconspicuous
as any glass object:
a mountain among mountains
a shot glass on a shelf
a skyscraper
in a sea of skyscrapers.

In its element
it flourishes invisibly.
Surrounded by snow and ice
its white body seems to weigh everything
and nothing.

The inside of it is hot and wet.
On the outside…
even the water is dry.

It dives
or reaches
down
into cold, wet places
to get its food.

Its thick, sleek layers
of fat
and skin
and fur
define a boundary
between the countries of cold
and of hot
of nearly lifeless
and of brimming over with life.

IBIS AND PIGLET

Subconscious flashback.
Hieroglyphic insinuation.
Angry, with no apologies.
Tame: I’m easy.
Defensive stance.
Deliberation.
What is this thing?
Meat and feathers.
"Nice weather we’re having."
Symbol and experience square off.
Pigs are people. They’re people.
Food.

MAGICIAN

This man lives on bird.
He eats, drinks, sleeps and wakes bird.
He lives in a high tower at the ends of the Earth.
All of them.
He can fly so it doesn't matter.

(That's what everyone says who can fly:
"I can fly, so it doesn't matter").

DOGHEART

Dogheart suffers from too much love.
Not outside of him, but all around his insides.
He wears his heart on his exposed tongue.
“Keep it down”, people tell him, “keep it hidden”. But dogheart is too obvious.
You can hear him breathing, loud, strong strokes that fill the whole room.
You can hear his heart beating, bleeding love all over the rug.
Your own heart melts open
to look at his eyes,
or else it slams shut with a bang and a blow to the head,
or two for good measure.
He takes it and stares at you. His eyes are always filled with tears anyway.
It doesn’t mean much.
Animals don't feel things the way we do. They’re like little kids.
They will repress anything for you, in order to keep loving you.
So full of expectation, of excitement, possibility.
You can break them with heartlessness.
It can be a sad spectacle to watch children get older, maybe six, maybe eighteen, maybe three seconds and counting: watch the expectation fade in their eyes, watch them begin to know not to expect love.
A dog never grows up like that.
He sits in your living room, rocking the entire house back and forth with the beat of his heart:
you, you, you, you, you.

SAFFRON CAT’S DREAM

The cat relates to its dreams the way it relates to birds, insects, and anything else
that hums or buzzes or calls it by name.
It lives for glitter. It is a glutton for shine.
It will take the appearance of intricate movement over the actuality of inertia any day.
And yet, the cat itself seems to be unable to decide
between a life of flashy acrobatics
and one of inertia.
It operates like a wind-up toy: action and reaction, cause and effect, stimulus and reflex, Newtonian physics.
This makes its inner workings seem deceptively simplistic.
If you see a cat in a dream
talk to it: it is sure to have something interesting to say.
A cat’s mind is habitually deconstructing the world around it, frolicking tirelessly in a sea of symbols.
It watches things for meaning, though its demeanor seems to imply
that it has no interest in the meaning of things.

THE DREAM OF THE WHITE COW

In India
Cows are sacred.
Here we eat them.
This cow is dreaming of fish.
She's dreaming of saltwater.
Her skin is milky
And her milk
Feeds an entire country full of babies.
We drink her everyday.
Nothing can wean us from her.
She dreams of the amniotic fluid from which she came
of the sea at the beginning of time
Of fish, fish, fish, fish, fish.

BABY PERSON

This kind of baby lives in dreams
He wasn't aware of something
now he is
I knew him a long time ago
Where is he now?
I'll never know
Where is he now?
I can't yet see
How he walked upon this Earth when I was just a baby
baby baby
Whatever happened to this Earth
When I was just a baby?

I want to know what he's looking at.

I think: I think: I think:

BIG PERSON

Big person could have stood up.
He could have said something.
He's sitting there where the experience left him.
He's waiting for it to happen again.

DRIVE BACK THERE

This was in a dream
in my dream we drove back there
a family trip.
We saw these elephant things,
and then our car sank in the mud where we had parked it.
At first it was only a puddle.
Now there's water everywhere.
It closes over our windows.
We are trying to get out.
I think:
this is older than anything. Nothing
is more present than memory.

AND SEE THEM

This is also from my dream
before I woke up.
Have you ever had the experience of dreams that seem more real than waking life?
Right there at your fingertips.
Palpable.
Crucial.
The alien seems more familiar
than anything you've experienced before.
You can reach out and touch that veil that breathes
breaks open at your fingertips
your skin.
Open.
Your body moves.
There's music with this.
Open at your fingertips
your skin.
Breathe.
Closer.
The softest outlines are sometimes stronger
than the hardest edges.
A cloud is lifted
an older one is applied.
A darker one.
Can you breathe?
Danger.
You see things you haven't seen before in a long, long time.

PET AND PERSON(A)

Animals need to be protected from each other.
People live in zoos because otherwise we would be in serious danger.
Animals need to be protected from each other just like people do.
That's why we build so many cages for animals:
we're only trying to take care of them
the way we care for ourselves.

ANIMALS

Animals live in a different world.
Paradoxically, it often seems the more human.
This is why we think animals are cute
and why we make up stories about them and give them funny names.
This is why many people keep pets.
The fact is: we see every other living and non-living thing in the universe as a person.
That's why I want to be an animal when I grow up.

©2018 Bennett Italia