Or again I issued as a luna moth,

circles of gold spotting my lavender wings.

I have zigzagged with blue water bugs

among white lotus and pond lilies.

From my silver throat in the dew of evening

came a whippoorwill call, one, another, more

as a slow gold moon told time with climbing.

I am the chameleon taking the tint of what I live on,

the water frog green as the scum he sits on,

the tree frog gray as the tree-bark-gray.

The duck, the swan, the goose, met me as sisters,

the beaver, the porcupine, the chinchilla, as brothers.

The rattlesnakes let me live with them

to eat mice, to salivate birds and rabbits

and fatten in sleep on noontime rocks.

I was a lizard, a texas horned toad,

a centipede counting my century of legs.

I was a crocodile in africa

with a lazy mouthful of teeth.

The stealth of the rat, the mink, the squirrel, came.

The weasel gave me his lingo

of now-you-see-me now-you-don’t.

The rabbit hide-out in clover, the gopher hole,

the mole tunnel, the corn-shock nest of the mouse,

these were a few of my homes.

One summer night with fireflies

I too was fluttering night gold.

Long ago I ran with the eohippus,

the little horse that was.

I wore dodo feathers

but that’s all passed.

I had a feathered form fade in fog:

you can find it now in feathered fossils.

I was a mammoth, a dinosaur

and other hulks too big to last.

I have been more quadrupeds than I can name.

I was the son of a wild jackass

with swift and punishing heels.

I lifted my legs and carried a camel hump

in slow caravans pausing at nightfall,

lifting my hump again at dawn.

I locked my horns with another moose;

our antlers lie locked and our bones whitening.

I slouched up hills of ice with polar bears,

practiced smell with the red fox,

trained my fangs with timber wolves.

I fight now for the rights to a carcass.

The killer who crouches, gets set, and leaps

is a kinsman I can call my cousin.

The strangling gibberish of the gorilla

comes out of my anxious mouth.

Among a thousand ring-tailed monkeys

scratching buttocks, sharing fleas,

shinning up trees in guatemala, I am one.

Among the blue-rumped baboons,

chattering chimpanzees and leering orangoutangs,

I am at home using paws for hands, hands for paws.

The howl of one hyena eating another is mine.

In a boneless tube of ooze

I soaked dumb days with sponges

off the gulfcoast sea-bottom.

Now I am the parrot

who picks up palaver and repeats it.

Now I am the river-hog, the hippopotamus

and I am the little bird who lives in his ear

and tells him when to get up and where to go.

I took a long sweet time learning to talk

and now I carry many half-words not yet made,

hankering hoodoo words taking shape in mud:

protoplasm, spermatozoa, phantasms, taboos.