Still life

Still Life

Kathy Nilsson

I'm having trouble looking animals in the eye.

Their empty suits in outer space!

Monkeys injected with a virus to show off

Our eminent domain, the nervous system.

Teacup pigs we breed and obsessive mice

Worrying themselves bald in a miniature opera.

For pleasures of the tongue we are

Winking cattle out of meadows

Slashing their throats and swiftly quartering them.

In riding habits with gold flame pins we ride horses

To hounds, chase a fennec fox until his red

Coat flares up against the extinction

Of light. Once in a circus we made

An elephant disappear and he did not mind.


It was difficult to choose a poem out of those I has available to me today. So many seemed to have images of shut and violence and death and I felt too sensitive for it today. Or maybe I like poems that make me feel holy in a less human way.

So this poem was a compromise, concerned as it is with the obscenity of our cruelty to animals, our exploitation of them. It deals with those horrors but without too much horror - I say that, but there is plenty of horror actually. Still somehow I find it more bearable here.

How is it more bearable? I guess because her list is quite detached, almost jokey in a way. There are these things that we do, but somehow these things are made so bizarre that it is easy to detach, to feel it to be happening somewhere else, done by someone else, under the umbrella of 'we'.

I'm not sure that I can identify the technical elements... There are some pleasurable sound effects - "empty suits in outer space"; chase a fennec fox until his red coat flares up against the extinction of light". i can't really find an explicit pattern to the rhythm. The are some nice subtle rhymes or echoes - space/mice; show off/ nervous; opera/we are; red/made.

This light touch, these subtly rhythms and rhymes do seem to keep the whole thing light. And then there is a overwheming tragedy to the description of the fox's death - this beautiful creature hounded and savaged to death, to to the end of light, to extinction - like so many other creatures we have made extinct.

And then the elephant who is made to disappear in a circus. Another kind of cruelty, another kind of extinction, and in the service of our entertainment. And the elephant did not mind? Not sure about that - a kind of mystery. Maybe he didn't mind because he was out of our control; maybe he didn't mind because so lobotomised by imprisonment; maybe did not mind as in paid no mind, paid no attention.