Subcutaneous You and Me
The New Orthophonic
The Shrinking Orchestra
Snail
Elephant
Biography on a Cat

Subcutaneous You and Me

Liger, liger: amphibite,
a hodgy-podgy hybrid fright,
and zoölogically zany
myrmidon of miscellany
diagrammed in science tomes
with corybantic chromosomes
and topsy-turvy DNA
and mixed alleles. The whole array
of metazoa never knew
of tragedy inside the zoo
until two ligers in the act
discovered the disturbing fact
that hijinks of the heterozygous
rarely end in little ligers.

The New Orthophonic

I

     clothesline
summer tanager / sky
     still and de stijl

II

two tomtits titter at two-
mbly-doodled flower-drips
intuiting that tulip’s lisp

III

whistlers and Whistler
Gainsborough and grain burrowers
ptarmigans and Parmigianino
Basquiat and bananaquits
passerines and Pissarro
dodos and Dada
Titian and titmice
smews and sfumato
warblers and Warhol
ablaq and blackbirds
Nighthawks and falcons
flocks and Fluxus
jays and Johns
line and linnets
El Greco and grackles
kiwis and Weiwei
form and formations

IV

A little
black
thing
among
the snow

chirps
chiri-
chiri-
chiar-
oscuro.

V

a peacock sleeps: a dream ajar
leaks fragments of a Fragonard

The Shrinking Orchestra

beet
hovenkovenprokof
ievivesvarèseres
  pighibaconb
oottotterlooö
sterreichreichreinckeneicheimrachman
inoffoffen
bachalk
anmassémessiaensaënsn
ancarroww
ebbereberlberliozmoz
artpärttart
inini
elsenmendelss
  ohnorff
schopschubertschererherb
ststraussglassazz
aiololobosbossi   
                                        böhm
                                        brahm
s
                                        bang
ert
                                        bing
enenescusu
 ch
onhon
eggereggerteggeeg
 kk
apsbergerer
nstholstst
 olz
besozzizich
bozzazaninini

poul
       e
       nc
bl
       o
       ch


ba
       ch

Snail

ambiguous
liguüs,
no one can tell

what you hide
inside
your arrobase shell;

how you choose
to ooze
which garden trail;

whose song
you throng
round the tulip’s tale;

(only
a lonely
heron keeps track

of worlds
you’ve furled
on a knapsack’d back)

Elephant

The elephant from Celebes
 would plant its trunk among the trees,
 and try to spell its common name,
 and leave its legs from where it came,
 and pour itself into the sea,
 and snuff its scent from memory,
 and hide its hide and tuck its tusk
 behind the Indonesian dusk
 where planets gleam like ivories
the elephant from Celebes.

Biography on a Cat

,   ,   ,   ,   ,   ,   ,   ,   .

Walter Ancarrow lives in New York City. 

Published August 2016.