"The Animal Within" (Rebecca Kavaler) (RIP)

April 19, 2008

Just heard via email that poet, novelist, and short story author Rebecca Kavaler has passed away. Here’s a poem of hers that I’ve seen shared in a few places.

"The Animal Within"

     Homage to Sir Thomas Browne

We, who supposedly contain all Africa and her prodigies,
are revealed for what we are only in the dying
when this flesh, once apostrophized as too too solid,
has proven renderable as any carcass and in the process
manufactured hollows where hillocks of cheeks once smiled,
then weeded out the overgrowth of hair to uncover
a tenderness-evoking curve of skull,
               a property we had thought 
               only of the newly born.

The mirror reflects no longer a unique face but the template
of the race: uncles, aunts, cousins far removed, some ancestor
who left no trace in family history yet surfaces now like
a species long thought extinct hauled up from the ocean’s depths
and when that dissolves what is left
               but the animal within
               which we made so much of.

–Rebecca Kavaler
from The Animal Within

Tags: obits, poetry, readings, rebecca kavaler