Poem
Maxine Beneba Clarke
The panther
quick-footed
and poor-visioned,
sumatran rhinos
(unless raising young calf)
prefer
to live alone
in solitary ease,
and singing their shadow
in the secluded pockets
of dense mountain forest, or wallowing
in wild lowland swamp
nosing sweet fallen-fruit chew,
or sniffing for salt lick,
and munching
on soft sapling shrub
they clod soil, and tread foliage:
fling wastage to mark
of their presence
lest we walk near
the last of their kind,
in the order perissodactyla,
in the country of malaysia
died last week
in captivity
red-brown,
two-horned-majestic,
of the phylum chordata,
and woke the first poem
that ever burrowed my skin
titled the panther,
by rainer maria rilke
it was utterly destroying,
at only twelve lines long:
afternoon light
through my childhood window,
on the mottled pages
of the hardback book
as the powerful animal
keened, and paced
all sinew, tethered power
and desperation
and i remember the line
(there is always a line)
i remember the line
that felled me
it seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world
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