Lupus Est In Fabula *
“The wolf has no friends but the parrots” — Edward Topsell, 1658
In youth he kills the stag
and then the sheep men claim as theirs.
Toothless in old age
he scratches for meat in the trash heaps and houses
of the city. Even if tamed
he hates the master who looks upon him.
If a wolf is first to see a man
the man will lose his voice.
To stop the attack
he must strip off his clothes
and bang two rocks together.
When a man struck a wolf with his club
she leapt and clawed the skin off his face.
Once healed, the man began to howl like a dog.
A wolf’s heart burned and beaten
to powder and taken in drink
will stop the thrashings of falling-sickness.
His canine tooth rubbed on the gums
of infants will open them up
for the teeth to grow through
without pain.
The wolf ate the pain.
The wolf has no friends but the parrots
who gaze down like gods.
They drop fruit in his path
to ease his toothless old age.
When he dies
they send his voice through the trees and
everyone falls silent at once.
[* Proverb to be said when there is a sudden silence, translating as “the wolf is in the tale”]
* * * * *
“A Four-Footed Strange Beast”
— Edward Topsell, The History of Four-Footed Beasts, 1658
We shared some alarm
at the Almighty’s piecing together a creature
from the scraps of others.
It is the size of a cat with a mallard’s bill,
feet cloven into parts like a dog’s,
a long neck, and the tail of a lizard. It is shelled
like a lobster or barded horse
with only the pointed ears unguarded.
Some affirm it has a voice like a swine
but not the meat, though Don Oviedo declares
the meat superior to that of kids —
if one wants to eat goat like the Spanish
who, in their superstition, thought the beast
sent to earth to test us.
Or so I am told.
Being of many parts, the beast has many names:
Tatus, Guinean Beast, Aiochtochth, Armato, Bardati;
but I believe it to be a Brasilian hedgehog
for the way it draws up within its armor
as a hedgehog does in its prickled skin
and thus is no great mystery.
Obtaining one from unknown source,
Marcellus the Apothecary of Ulmes stuffed it
for exhibition. Ladies,
after their initial faintness,
took to wearing hats and cloaks
pieced of stiff cloth like scales.
Only last year merchants brought the living creatures
to London’s wealthy estates where they wandered
among the gillyflowers and destroyed garden worms
until the winter damp killed them
and some settled into jars
on basement shelves of the science museum
where the public must pay the guards to see them.