The Carnivore
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Originally published in 1965.
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The Carnivore - David R. Slavitt
ITEM FROM NORWICH
The bit before the baseball scores: the man
seventy-two, found in a tarpaper shack
somewhere around the city dump he scavenged,
dead for a week. And underneath his mattress,
bankbooks with ninety-seven thousand dollars
and some odd change. It always makes the news,
sure-fire, like goldfish swallowing, flagpole sitting,
and the other traditional mortifications.
The Syrian,
Simeon Stylites, raised near Antioch
a column three feet around and sixty high,
on top of which the heat of thirty summers,
the cold of thirty winters he weathered, praying
in all the different postures of devotion:
erect, with arms akimbo as the cross,
or bowing forehead to feet, which exercise
was observed—twelve hundred and forty-four repetitions
(at length the weary spectator gave up).
The patient Simeon died atop his column.
In the regimen of the Egyptian monasteries:
two small biscuits (Paximacia loaves),
six ounces each; boiled vegetables to be served
but never eaten; on feast days a little cheese
or a small fish of the Nile. At Oxyrinchus,
thirty thousand monks adored such a fish
in the magnificent temple
of Strabo’s mention.
Novitiates
in our fraternities compare them to vitamin pills,
except when they flip their tails as they go down.
And the man by the dump—today’s report is from Norwich—
followed the dictates of the Caesarian Basil;
the laws of Martin of Tours; of Hilarion,
who left disciples in Sicily and Epirus
as well as Cyprus; of the Coptic Antony.
The impulse is with us always. Gestures survive:
testing has ruined the sea turtles’ sense of direction,
and after they come ashore to lay their eggs
they continue forward, crawling away from the water
to die of exhaustion in the inland grasses.
Their brains roasted by sun, in the final moments
their flippers resume that sweep in the dry sand
of swimming, of riding the currents of the lost sea.
THE LEMMINGS
Food short against the long days’ hunger, sunset
a fatty morsel in the western broth, and sick
of racing the birds and the tides on the sandspit
for bits of edible sea wrack at which to pick,
it seems no more unreasonable one day
to try at last that sea which somewhere reaches
a western landfall where each footfall may
fester with food, where it rolls down the beaches.
Thus their Columbus argues, convincing them,
for who has the strength to discuss or even care?
Slowly, like a tide, they begin to swim
westward in the nobility of despair.
And if they never return, who can say the conclusion
is the obvious drowning it probably all comes to
who has stared for twenty minutes at the horizon
where the herring silver touches the herring blue?