My husband unleashes beasts at our house,
not just Bottom with his ass’s head escaped from a dream,
but pot-bellied demons from Japan and a coiled ghost
with a girl’s face, her scales blue and white in moonlight.
A lion lounges in a sunny spot in the back bedroom.
Ever watchful, he yawns whenever I pass the door.
His companion, the unicorn, needed some air and now nibbles
pink double hibiscus, while bunnies munch on the lawn.
The dragon scorches the concrete garden wall when he snores,
but he fits tidily in a corner under the Cecile Brunner rose.
On the other hand, the phoenix, perched amid the orange blossoms,
cannot help but set the whole place ablaze when his time comes.
I carry my morning tea and toast through the dining room
where a satyr pulls petals from my birthday bouquet and stuffs them
into his mouth, preferring daisies to the carnations with their scent.
I understand why he avoids bathing, all that curly hair in tangles.
But he reeks of old booze and rotten meat, and his ears need cleaning.
The Minotaur keeps me company while I write at the patio table.
He’s grown too old for his storied appetites, and I’m no longer driven
by a hunger for words that filled this house with books.
When the Santa Ana winds pick up, I anchor my paper with flatware
and turn the notebook so the sun can’t reach the pages.
Better to work out here, knowing that the maw of the gates of hell,
with its jagged teeth of a cat, waits at the back of the coat closet.
Published in: Willawaw Journal, Issue 11, Winter 2020.
Back in the day of the four bedroom ranch house in Huntington Beach, most of my writing took place under a canvas gazebo in the back yard, roses and citrus trees around the concrete block wall, sounds of recess at the nearby school, a little salt in the air. The beagle referred to in the title basked on the lawn, keeping me company. The calico cat watched from the back of the sun room couch.
I’d been talking about writing a chapbook in the form of a bestiary for some time. As I remember, my introduction to the form was through Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings. My husband had recently given me the ultimate in bestiaries, Imaginary Beasts by Boria Sax, to add to my collection. He’d also given me The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals, each entry with tongue-in-cheek discussion about whether or not the beast is tref. (Either way, they’re only going to satisfy imaginary hungers.)
It was a time in my life when I was that most solitary of beasts, a writer with no community of artists around me. My community was comprised of those present in my library: Josephine Miles, Jane Kenyon, Jane Hirshfeld, Robert Bly. . . . Can’t you just see Bly as the lion? Isadora Duncan as a phoenix? So one sunny morning, I opened the Sax book to write about one monster. All this time my house and garden had been filled with these companions.
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