A tiger comes to mind.
The twilight
Exalts the vast and busy
And seems to set the bookshelves back in gloom;
Innocent, ruthless, bloodstained,
It wanders through its forest and its
Printing a track along the muddy
Of sluggish streams whose names it does not know(In its world there are no names or
Or time to come, only the vivid now)And makes its way across wild
Sniffing the braided labyrinth of
And in the wind picking the smell of
And tantalizing scent of grazing deer;
Among the bamboo's slanting stripes I
The tiger's stripes and sense the bony
Under the splendid, quivering cover of skin.
Curving oceans and the planet's wastes keep
Apart in vain; from here in a house far
In South America I dream of you,
Track you,
O tiger of the Ganges' banks.
It strikes me now as evening fills my
That the tiger addressed in my
Is a shadowy beast, a tiger of
And scraps picked up at random out of books,
A string of labored tropes that have no life,
And not the fated tiger, the deadly
That under sun or stars or changing
Goes on in Bengal or Sumatra
Its rounds of love and indolence and death.
To the tiger of symbols I hold
The one that's real, the one whose blood runs
As it cuts down a herd of buffaloes,
And that today, this August third,
Fifty-nine, throws its shadow on the grass;
But by the act of giving it a name,
By trying to fix the limits of its world,
It becomes a fiction not a living beast,
Not a tiger out roaming the wilds of earth.
We'll hunt for a third tiger now, but
The others this one too will be a
Of what I dream, a structure of words, and
The flesh and one tiger that beyond all
Paces the earth.
I know these things quite well,
Yet nonetheless some force keeps driving
In this vague, unreasonable, and ancient quest,
And I go on pursuing through the
Another tiger, the beast not found in verse.
