1: Wryneck
Name: Wryneck.

Description: The head is small but with

a long beak, somewhere between

an ibis and a toucan. The body is

a coiled spring, feet long

and avian.

                 Movement: A jaunty, fairground

rhythm with a little hop like

someone preparing an awkward kick.

Diet/favourite offerings: Smooth

twigs twisted slightly at one

end. Marriages, especially first

ones. Childhoods, especially

first ones. Sounds/cries:

Difficult to describe, but suggestive

of the word ‘disconsolate’.
2: Visits from wild animals
There are crocs outside in great numbers.

Now and then we shoot some

to keep a decent distance. The sensation

is like cracking a prawn or crayfish

with your thumbs.

                            There’s a lion

half-tamed who pauses as you open

the door for him. He sniffs something

below the reach of human nostrils

and comes back in, lies

down for a chin scratch.

Hot baths can’t equal

the rough pleasure of his tongue.
3: Visits from extinct animals
And once a thylacine came. Something wolfish

in its long head, its fur thick

and rough. Something hyena-like

in its knowing eyes. It knew

it was extinct because of us

(one pale human looking

much like another) so we worried

when the kids wanted to stroke

its long jaw, mimic its drunken

walk. It was like meeting someone

whose suffering you’d heard about,

someone excluded come out

of the past. It could almost have been

a person disguised or a sleazy god

in an old myth, hidden in a skin.

It had the look of someone condemned

who knows he’s innocent and has something on you.
4: Sphere
Another household creature, quieter

being, the sphere, whose movement

is a circumambient flowing,

who seems to feed on nothing, or quietly

on itself, diminishing imperceptibly.

It’s mostly hollow centre,

an emptiness to revolve around.

Not some crude male imagining

of the female as lack, but something

before gender, that will outlive

all animals, everything weak enough

to need to move. It is utterly prior

and patient, runs kaleidoscopic

shapes across its skin. It’s

billions of years before the wryneck.