You slump at my tree's foot, complex angsts brewing
While our red-clawed, red-beaked animal furies
In these shadowy plots hatch our own undoing.
If thinking is man's ruin, have no worries.
If you could speak the whistling words of birds
Whose sound to you like music now appears,
As nature's snow-white cream man sours to curds
To chew, our songs would curdle in your ears:
'Fly!, fly! The bearded fox is on the prowl!'---
And 'Keep away! These berries are quick poison!'---
'I need a mate, or I was born for nought'---
'Go south, go south!'---'The horned and hoary owl
Brings swift, crook-taloned death.' You seek strange joys in
Ignorance, to envy lives so fraught!
Now dull-brained human scientists proclaim
That tool-use is no more unique to apes
Than language, war, or thumbs. They're all the same
Emergent properties, like wine from grapes.
I am not certain that is Hippocrene;
The Pierian Spring leaves no such scarlet stain.
A jug of wine might well complete the scene:
Your book of verse, &c. A brain
Like smiling Aesop's, where morals mask the roar
Of lions, the flopping fear of fish in the net,
The worm-wove cloak we dress up in our tomb in---
I think that must be Lethe. Drink, and soar
Above your brain, and me, and quite forget
That you were all too sentient, all too human.
