Poems (Marianne Moore)/MY APISH COUSINS
MY APISH COUSINS
winked too much and were afraid of snakes. The zebras, supreme in their abnormality; the elephants with their fog-colored skin and strictly practical appendages were there, the small cats and the parrakeet— trivial and humdrum on examination, destroying bark and portions of the food it could not eat.
I recall their magnificence, now not more magnificent than it is dim. It is difficult to recall the ornament, speech, and precise manner of what one might call the minor acquaintances twenty years back; but I shall never forget—that Gilgamesh among the hairy carnivora—that cat with the
wedge-shaped, slate-gray marks on its forelegs and the resolute tail, astringently remarking: "They have imposed on us with their pale, half fledged protestations, trembling about in inarticulate frenzy, saying it is not for all of us to understand art, finding it all so difficult, examining the thing
as if it were something inconceivably arcanic, as symmetrically frigid as something carved out of chrysopras or marble—strict with tension, malignant in its power over us and deeper than the sea when it proffers flattery in exchange for hemp, rye, flax, horses, platinum, timber and fur."