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FURTHER READING
Poems by Joseph Ceravolo
Drunken Winter
Poems About Animals and Pets
27,000 Miles
by Albert Goldbarth
from The Kitten and Falling Leaves
by William Wordsworth
I Am! Said the Lamb [excerpt]
by Theodore Roethke
Jubilate Agno, Fragment B, [For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry]
by Christopher Smart
A Crocodile
by Thomas Lovell Beddoes
A List of Praises
by Anne Porter
Animals and Art
by Ron Padgett
At the Zoo
by William Makepeace Thackeray
Bats
by Paisley Rekdal
Darwin's Finches
by Deborah Digges
Eletelephony
by Laura Elizabeth Richards
Epitaph to a Dog
by George Gordon Byron
Flamingo Dreams
by William Saphier
Freedom in Ohio
by Jennifer Chang
Gila
by Rigoberto González
Goldfish Are Ordinary
by Stacie Cassarino
Grasshopper
by Ron Padgett
Hawk
by Daniel Waters
horse vision
by Julian T. Brolaski
How Doth the Little Busy Bee
by Isaac Watts
Leda and the Swan
by W. B. Yeats
Maine Seafood Company
by Matthew Dickman
Me and the Otters
by Dorothea Lasky
Mole
by Wyatt Prunty
Nonsense Alphabet
by Edward Lear
Orkney Interior
by Ian Hamilton Finlay
Psalm
by George Oppen
Quiet the Dog, Tether the Pony
by Marilyn Chin
Skunk Hour
by Robert Lowell
Testy Pony
by Zachary Schomburg
The Armadillo
by Elizabeth Bishop
The Bear
by Galway Kinnell
The Caterpillar
by Robert Graves
The Crocodile
by Lewis Carroll
The Dusk of Horses
by James Dickey
The Eagle
by Lord Alfred Tennyson
The Fly
by William Blake
The Future is an Animal
by Tina Chang
The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me
by Delmore Schwartz
The Lorca Variations (XXVIII)
"For Turtles"

by Jerome Rothenberg
The Moose
by Elizabeth Bishop
The Paper Nautilus
by Marianne Moore
The Parakeets
by Alberto Blanco
The Purple Cow
by Gelett Burgess
The Return
by Frances Richey
The Snail
by William Cowper
The Tyger
by William Blake
The Windhover
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Thing
by Rae Armantrout
To a Mouse,
by Robert Burns
Turn of a Year
by Joan Houlihan
Wild Gratitude
by Edward Hirsch
Wilderness
by Carl Sandburg
Woodchucks
by Maxine Kumin
Related Prose
Purists Awake
by Donald Revell
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Ho Ho Ho Caribou

 
by Joseph Ceravolo

I

Leaped at the caribou. My son looked at the caribou. The kangaroo leaped on the fruit tree. I am a white man and my children are hungry which is like paradise. The doll is sleeping. It lay down to creep into the plate. It was clean and flying.

II

Where you...the axes are. Why is this home so hard. So much like the sent over the courses below the home having a porch. Felt it on my gate in the place where caribous jumped over. Where geese sons and pouches of daughters look at me and say "I'm hungry daddy."

III

Not alone in the gastrous desert. We are looking at the caribous out in the water swimming around. We want to go in the ocean along the dunes. Where do we like? Like little lice in the sand we look into a fruit expanse. Oh the sky is so cold. We run into the water. Lice in heaven.

IV

My heel. Ten o'clock the class. Underwater fish brush by us. Oh leg not reaching! The show is stopping at the sky to drive in the truck. Tell us where to stop and eat. And drink which comes to us out in the sand is at a star. My pants are damp. Is tonight treating us but not reaching through the window.

V

Where is that bug going? Why are your hips rounded as the sand? What is jewelry? Baby sleeps. Sleeping on the cliff is dangerous. The television of all voice is way far behind. Do we flow nothing? Where did you follow that bug to? See quick......is flying

VI

Caribou, what have I done? See how her heart moves like a little bug......under my thumb. Throw me deeply. I am the floes. Ho ho ho caribou, light brown and wetness caribou. I stink and I know it. "Screw you!...you're right."

VII

Everyone has seen us out with the caribou but no one has seen us out in the car. You passed beyond us. We saw your knees but the other night we couldn't call you. You were more far than a widow feeling you. Nothing has been terrible. We are the people who have been running with animals. More than when we run?

VIII

Tell us where o eat to stop and eat. The diner is never gonna come. The forest things are passing. I did drink my milk like a mother of wolves. Wolves on the desert of ice cold love, of fireproof breasts and the breast I took like snow. Following me I love you and I fall beyond and I eat you like a bow and arrow withering in the desert.

IX

No one should be mean. Making affection and all the green winters wide awake. Blubber is desert. Out on the firm lake, o firm and aboriginal kiss. To dance, to hunt, to sing, no one should be mean. Not needing these things.

X

Like a flower, little light, you open and we make believe we die. We die all around you like a snake in a well and we come up out of the warm well and are born again out of dry mammas, nourishing mammas, always holding you as I love you and am revived inside you, but die in you and am never born again in the same place; never stop!






From The Green Lake is Awake. Copyright © 1994 by Joseph Ceravolo. Published by Coffee House Press. Used by permission of the publisher.
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