Classic Poem

A kind of monkey or pine-lemur, A
not of interest to the monkey,
in a kind of Flaubert's Carthage, it defies one —
this " Paduan cat with lizard, " this " tiger in a bamboo thicket. "
" An interwoven somewhat, " it will not come out.
Ignore the Foo dog and it is forthwith more than a dog,
its tail superimposed upon itself in a complacent half spiral,
this pine-tree — this pine-tiger, is a tiger, not a dog.
It knows that if a nomad may have dignity,
Gibraltar has had more —
that " it is better to be lonely than unhappy. "
A conifer contrived in imitation of the glyptic work of jade and hard-stone cutters,
a true curio in this bypath of curio-collecting,
it is worth its weight in gold, but no one takes it
from these woods in which society's not knowing is colossal,
the lion's ferocious chrysanthemum head seeming kind by comparison.
This porcupine-quilled, complicated starkness —
this is beauty — " a certain proportion in the skeleton which gives the best results. "
One is at a loss, however, to know why it should be here,
in this morose part of the earth —
to account for its origin at all;
but we prove, we do not explain our birth.