Interspecies Kinship

You’ve opened up an unplanned stretch of days –
you can’t complain what fills them – you
celebrate the ways disturbances and spills
from unaccustomed sources and degrees
of unapologetic interruption – edgy dramas bursting

out of taxis, sighing yellow-greens of dying
late October leaves, and clamorously loud
Latina teens – make you expend quick spasms
of abrupt attention: lends a strange and funny ease
to the proceedings you would not have thought

to think could be. And now, abounding on another
sidewalk brink – the doorway of an upper-west-side
grade school – you encounter a menagerie: nine
animals from some availing farm with whom you feel
an interspecies kinship: a couple mallard ducks,

a pig, a sheep, two chickens and a goat and a duet
of ponies who devote their funky selves (hooeee –
they smell!) to the prospective entertainment
of a group of kindergarten kids still in their classrooms,
walls apart, inside. As all the birds and mammals

burrow blissfully in straw and seed and feed,
in which they’ve snorted, quacked and chirped
and peed – and even as they stink up half a block
of New York street – you can’t not think this business
of an unplanned stretch of days is sweet.


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