Learning Animals and Insects in 3rd Grade

I could hear the horse neigh in that
    third-grade class,
its big head poked over the picture's
    white picket fence
while Sister told us the old, useless
    ones were sent to Alpo
or Zweiger's Glue Factory on Cherry Road,
each of us looking around to see if it was true,
seeing all kinds of snakes sloughing their skins
and bats hanging by their claws in the dark
    caves underground,
a giant turtle on its back, gasping for breath
as we sat straight at our desks
and yelled out which ones lay eggs,
which ones bore their young, listening
to the whales as they circled the globe,
listening to Ray Martineau's asthmatic breathing
that fell like the falling snow, shhhh, shhhh,
    against the dripping window,
one of every kind of beast circling us,
all their eyes mirroring our eyes back
except for the ants who never stopped tunneling
busy from the second our lights went on
with their tunnels that went sideways and up
    and down,
sudden small pockets of silence in which they
    passed
along the shadowed, erratic trails that dead-ended
    against invisible walls
and then doubled back, again and again, in that
    late, upstate New York winter day.

 

Leo Roberts, Counting the Black Angels (University of Illinois Press, 1994)