March Calf

by Ted Hughes

Right from the start he is dressed in his best - his blacks and his whites

Little Fauntleroy - quiffed and glossy,

A Sunday suit, a wedding natty get-up,

Standing in dunged straw

Under cobwebby beams, near the mud wall,

Half of him legs,

Shining-eyed, requiring nothing more

But that mother's milk come back often.

Everything else is in order, just as it is.

Let the summer skies hold off, for the moment.

This is just as he wants it.

A little at a time, of each new thing, is best.

Too much and too sudden is too frightening -

When I block the light, a bulk from space,

To let him in to his mother for a suck,

He bolts a yard or two, then freezes,

Staring from every hair in all directions,

Ready for the worst, shut up in his hopeful religion,

A little syllogism

With a wet blue-reddish muzzle, for God's thumb.

You see all his hopes bustling

As he reaches between the worn rails towards

The topheavy oven of his mother.

He trembles to grow, stretching his curl-tip tongue -

What did cattle ever find here

To make this dear little fellow

So eager to prepare himself?

He is already in the race, and quivering to win -

His new purpled eyeball swivel-jerks

In the elbowing push of his plans.

Hungry people are getting hungrier,

Butchers developing expertise and markets,

But he just wobbles his tail - and glistens

Within his dapper profile

Unaware of how his whole lineage

Has been tied up.

He shivers for feel of the world licking his side.

He is like an ember - one glow

Of lighting himself up

With the fuel of himself, breathing and brightening.

Soon he'll plunge out, to scatter his seething joy,

To be present at the grass,

To be free on the surface of such a wideness,

To find himself himself. To stand. To moo.

Mountain Lion

by D H Lawrence

Climbing through the January snow, into the Lobo canyon

Dark grow the spruce-trees, blue is the balsam, water sounds still unfrozen, and the trail is still evident.

Men!

Two men!

Men! The only animal in the world to fear!

They hesitate.

We hesitate.

They have a gun.

We have no gun.

Then we all advance, to meet.

Two Mexicans, strangers, emerging out of the dark and snow and inwardness of the Lobo valley.

What are they doing here on this vanishing trail?

What is he carrying?

Something yellow.

A deer?

Qué tiene, amigo?

León -

He smiles, foolishly, as if he were caught doing wrong.

And we smile, foolishly, as if we didn't know.

He is quite gentle and dark-faced.

It is a mountain lion,

A long, long slim cat, yellow like a lioness.

Dead.

He trapped her this morning, he says, smiling foolishly.

Lift up her face,

Her round, bright face, bright as frost.

Her round, fine-fashioned head, with two dead ears;

And stripes in the brilliant frost of her face, sharp, fine dark rays,

Dark, keen, fine rays in the brilliant frost of her face.

Beautiful dead eyes.

Hermoso es!

They go out towards the open;

We go on into the gloom of Lobo.

And above the trees I found her lair,

A hole in the blood-orange brilliant rocks that stick up, a little cave.

And bones, and twigs, and a perilous ascent.

So, she will never leap up that way again, with the yellow flash of a mountain lion's long shoot!

And her bright striped frost-face will never watch any more, out of the shadow of the cave in the blood-orange rock,

Above the trees of the Lobo dark valley-mouth!

Instead, I look out.

And out to the dim of the desert, like a dream, never real;

To the snow of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, the ice of the mountains of Picoris,

And near across at the opposite steep of snow, green trees motionless standing in snow, like a Christmas toy.

And I think in this empty world there was room for me and a mountain lion.

And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million or two of humans

And never miss them.

Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white frost-face of that slim yellow mountain lion!