ARTISTS
Dancers
Long after chalky eggs have drifted
on a floating mat,
even after young have hatched,
a pair of great-crested grebes,
sighting white cheeks
and pointed beaks after time apart,
start to dance. One bird dives
and swims toward the other,
who arches her back, fluffing herself
like a black-winged cat. The diver
bursts from water, wings outstretched.
The two plunge under,
re-emerge with weeds, like roses
in beaks, press breasts together,
treading water, and stamp their feet.
Musician
Rolling his fibrous, thousand-pound tongue,
a humpback croons a long, lush song,
“Ah, what a whale of a male I am,”
in a seven-octave voice. Swimming
in a sine wave, he slides
through the sea, a one-man band,
blending pure and percussive tones
in symphonic ratios with rhymed refrains.
You’d think he’d studied Mozart
and Bach as he leaps on beat, landing
with a hundred-ton splash
to belt an encore for the salmon and bass.
Architect
The satin bowerbird weaves an avenue
of twigs and sticks
with foot-high walls, adorned
with blossoms, beads and poker chips.
He makes paint of saliva
and berries, crushed and mixed,
daubs it on walls, brushing
with waxy leaves, then takes a flower
in his beak, dances down the bower,
singing, flapping his wings.
When he wins a mate, the walls
collapse as they violently conjugate.
Afterward she flies away
to make her own place: she’ll raise
her young alone in a plain brown nest.
Painters
Asian elephants, each with a brush
in its trunk, are Abstract Expressionists,
five-ton de Koonings, making
biomorphic shapes. Do you see
the king cobra under fan-shaped leaves,
the horns of an antelope, bamboo, teaks?
Colors capture rolling plains,
the Chao Phraya River delta, braided
into channels that flood rice fields
abuzz with mosquitoes. Layers of paint
record chaos that finally gives way
to the will of the artist, shifting her weight.
–Lucille Lang Day