Animal Rescue

To say nothing of all the moths and wasps
I’ve been opening windows for;

the sheep headlocked in the wire
of a fence,

the newt in the slippery inch
of a dog-bowl of rain,

the spider coming off and off
its wall of death in the kitchen sink

and the bat flopping the living-room floor
in a straight-jacket of dust, cobweb and hair.

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I have angled your skulls
impossibly free,

poured you out into colour-matched weeds
at the edge of the pond,

offered you into a wineglass and out
to the forest of herbs

and taken you into my own
unravelling hands and worked you loose

in this borrowed house; let you go
on the slopes by the buzzard tree.

Now, who’s coming for me?

Each section of Antony Dunn’s elegant diptych, taken from his fourth collection, Take This One to Bed (published by Valley Press) is built around five couplets. The extra, lonely last line in the second part symmetrically balances the title, Animal Rescue, which (as in the title-poem) asks to be read as an occluded first line.

Moths and wasps are the first beneficiaries of the speaker’s kindness, and their rescue swiftly accomplished. It’s important that they are insects, minor but annoying creatures, easily slaughtered by the careless or combative householder who files them under “pest”. We’re being shown, by contrast, a person who notices, and bothers with, the least of the kingdom. The verb-tense, present-perfect, declares such activity habitual: “I’ve been opening windows …”. This speaker is clearly a good sort (sensitive and caring, just like us): we like him, we are ready to listen to his sure-to-be comforting and amusing anecdotes.

Thus set in motion, the poem evolves into increasing discomfort. The predicament of each creature – sheep, newt, spider, bat – is briefly encapsulated but not without evoking the horror of the experience from the creature’s perspective. Dunn has a fine sense of what a single word can do, how a specific physical condition achingly inheres in a term like “headlocked”. Strong verbs are essential to his process: the spider “coming off and off / its wall of death …” or the bat “flopping the living room floor” – not flopping on it or over it, but, transitively, flopping it, a bat’s impression of turbulence as it struggles to fly.

The second section has our self-conscious narrator carefully restoring each creature, in order of appearance, to its rightful place. The creatures are generally addressed, now, with a vocative plural “you”, but there’s no puzzle in pairing up the rescue-narrative with the trapped creature of the earlier section. The newt, stranded “in the slippery inch / of a dog-bowl of rain” receives the most whimsical help: “poured … into colour-matched weeds …” The speaker knows exactly how touching – and slightly ridiculous – his intervention must appear to any objective observer.

A steadily heightened emotional pitch in the second part doesn’t rule out humour, but sharpens the sensation of ingratitude. There’s a wry “after all I have done for you” tone, reminiscent of the most searing of parent-child, wife-and-husband, quarrels. It’s not, we feel, only the speaker’s hands which are “unravelling” as they extricate the bat from human debris.

A nightmare has squirmed into the rescue narrative itself. The bat, so carefully “worked … loose,” is set free into a less than friendly environment. Perhaps, in fact, all the creatures are being addressed when the speaker tells them he has “let you go / on the slopes by the buzzard tree.” Slopes may be slippery, and buzzards are predatory. The natural environment damages its inhabitants, despite their adaptations: the right place may be as dangerous as the wrong place, simply differently dangerous.

The last line’s hopelessly hopeful question (“Now, who’s coming for me?”) would probably earn a laugh at a poetry reading, but it would be a careless laugh. Newly summoned, the earlier images of frightening displacement flock back and adhere to the animal most in need of rescue – the speaker, and, implicitly, his human audience. It’s a cri de coeur which faintly echoes Philip Larkin’s terrifying “Where can we live but days?” Since the theological solution to the sense of displacement vanished from our intellectual horizon, the question of rescue has no answer – unless we believe we can get ourselves out of our own fences, dog-bowls, kitchen sinks and straitjackets.