Poem # 29: Raccoon

Housesitting years ago

for a beautiful and wealthy heiress

I went downstairs to the kitchen

to prepare a late-night meal.

As I opened the refrigerator

a raccoon poked his head

through the pet door intended

for the heiress’ Airedale

presently asleep upstairs in the bed.

We stared at each other

and I believe we both

wore the same slightly-embarrassed

look: him for his trespass,

me for my after-hours

eating. No doubt it was food

the raccoon was after

and this was not a first-time

incursion. Our shared gaze

lasted possibly a second

but afterwards seemed much

longer. He backed out

discreetly, though quickly,

and seemed to me touchingly

fastidious in the deferral

of his need. In my bemusement

I forgot about my hunger

which was in any case not real

but only a nightly routine.

*

I don't know why this rather slight memory stayed in my head (the experience was a quarter-century ago); it was, though, an uncanny experience. The timing of the whole thing felt odd, as I recall. I had been by myself in the house for a few days, writing and reading -- in someone else's home, a rather nice one (funny how we grow quickly accustomed to elegance, particularly when no one is watching us). So, my mind must have been made ready for strangeness.

Beyond the actual experience, the above poem is most likely under the influence of a little-known (in English) 19th and early-20th-century German poet named Christian Morgenstern. Here are two relevant poems, found online:

The Birth of Philosophy

The Moorland Sheep just stares at me in awe

As if she’d never seen a Man before.

Our looks lock on. We stand as if asleep;

This feels the first time that I’ve seen a sheep.

(Translated by David Cram) 

Searching for the above poem, I found another on Wikipedia, translator unknown:

Vice Versa

A rabbit in his meadow lair

Imagines none to see him there.

But aided by a looking lens

A man with eager diligence

Inspects the tiny long-eared gnome

From a convenient near-by dome.

Yet him surveys, or so we learn

A god from far off, mild and stern.

*

I especially like the mise-en-abime of the second poem. 

I'm not sure why I've left the lines about the "heiress" in the poem. (The house-sitting was for a novelist whose family is famous for their chocolate). I think this bit of documentary detail is important to the poem precisely because of its irrelevance; at least its irrelevance to the ostensible theme. "Heiress" adds a faint touch of fairy-tale frame to an otherwise mundane context, and possibly doubles the raccoon's uncanniness -- foreshadows or echoes it, I mean.

Oh, the poem doesn't yet do what I want it to do; but the frame I'm attempting, or should work on in revising, goes all the way back to a painting I saw at the Met, just after I had arrived in New York, when I was 17. Right now I can't recall the artist; she was a woman, so that should make it easy to search it out. The painting must have been late 18th or early 19th century: A woman stands at a window, coyly looking back at us, through the outer window of the painting itself; back through the painted window where she stands, the viewer sees, far off in an architectural field, a woman and man standing near a door, conversing or perhaps romancing one another.

Paintings are mute, as Horace observes; nor can they move in time, like poems or novels. But the effect of the little scene, centered but small in perspective, is to throw us back in time, or into a recent encounter of the woman herself who stands smirking at us at the window; she is sharing a secret of her own, but in the plane of the painting it is fused into one moment.

So, when I was seventeen, and wanted to be an artist myself, I was struck (without having the words yet to describe it) by the magic of this painting, the smiling woman, and also by the elegant transcendence of limits (the Horatian contest, that is, between blind poems and mute paintings); it was a lesson in economy of means, in the conventions of art -- and in the complementary relations of visual and literary media. More comes from within the narrow frame of a successful painting or poem than a first encounter can reveal. Decades on, I'm still struggling with how to pull it off.