Transcript

I’m Maggie Smith and this is The Slowdown. 

As a writer, I’m always jotting things down, taking notes, making lists. More and more, I use the Notes app on my phone, but for years I scribbled on whatever scraps of paper I could find: carbon copies from my checkbook, receipts pulled from my wallet, even napkins in a pinch. The method has changed but my impulse is the same—to hold on to something before it slips away.

Today’s poem is a favorite of mine for its associative leaps—the way it carries us from image to image, memory to memory. I admire the way it uses the language we encounter in our lives to make those leaps: road signs, the names of streets and flowers, the lists we find in our pockets.

Animal Prudence
by Kathy Fagan

Mice drink the rainwater before dying by
the poison we set in the cupboard for them.
They come for the birdseed, and winter
is so grey here the sight of a single cardinal 
can keep us warm for days. We’ll justify 
anything—and by we, I mean I, and by
I, I mean we, with our man-is-the-only-
animal-who and our manifest destiny, killers
each of us by greater or lesser degrees. 
Instead of a gun or knife in my pocket
there are two notes. Unwhich the//
dandelion, reads one. I don’t know what
it means but cannot throw it away;
it is soft as cashmere. The other says:
coffee, chocolate, birdseed. I should be
extinct by now, except I can’t make it 
on to that list either. Like toothpicks
made of plain wood, some things are 
increasingly hard to find. Even when he was
a young drunk going deaf from target practice, 
my father preferred picking his teeth 
to brushing them. My mother preferred
crying. They bought or rented places
on streets named Castle, Ring, Greystone—
as if we were heroes in a Celtic epic.
Our romanticism was earned, and leaned
toward the gothic, but lichen aimed 
for names on gravestones far
lovelier than our own. It seemed to last
a long time, that long time ago, finches
pixelating the hurricane fences,
cars idling exhaust, dandelions bolting
from flower to weed to delicacy,
like me. Egyptians prepared their dead
for a difficult journey; living is more
—I was going to say, more difficult,
but more alone will do, imprudent—
unlike art—always falling below or rising
above the Aristotelian mean. In France,
a common rural road sign reads:
Animal Prudence. Purely cautionary,
it has nothing to do with Aristotle,
but offers sound advice nonetheless.
These days, I caution my father more 
than he ever cautioned me. He hears
his aural hallucinations better and shows
greater interest: sportscasters at ballgames,
revelers at the parties he insists on. 
He’s got all his own teeth, so toothpicks
must do the job. His pockets fill with them.
There are always half a dozen rattling 
like desert bones in my dryer. I think 
of the mason who chiseled his face
in the cathedral wall; he couldn’t write 
his name. The yellow bouquets I’d offer
my mother by the fistful also got their name
in France: dent de lion, meaning teeth of the lion. 

“Animal Prudence” by Kathy Fagan from BAD HOBBY © 2022 Kathy Fagan. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Milkweed Editions.