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Little Creatures


The harvest of mammoth has begun.


A vulture luftwaffe racks the kempt neighborhoods of

Kansas with its shadow


            and three mice died on the same spot of pantry

floor three days running.


“They like to die together” you said and it’s true that

suicides take hands on bridge and cliff-face; it’s other

hands that string the noose.


            The owls are edging into day,

            each wing riding a transparent balloon.


                        With the fields burnt of cover

                        prey is too numerous to care for craft.


“It’s the little creatures taking over,” you said and so

we go across the glaciers scattering bread.




William Emery

levelheaded: Little Creatures


It’s probably safe to say the phrase “harvest of mammoth” has never been spoken in direct reference to an actual, ongoing mammoth hunting season. By the time the English language managed to pull “mammoth” from the Russian word “mamant,” all species of mammoth had been dead for thousands of years. But all languages are retroactive, and this is a part of the reason the first line of William Emery’s “Little Creatures” is so jarring—it generates an image of a prehistoric “harvest of mammoth” using English, a necessary anachronism. So, it sounds like it’s been translated from a text written on a cave wall. Very likely this wouldn’t warrant mention (we speak English, after all) if not for the bizarre and dazzling subsequent appearance of the word “luftwaffe.” “Luftwaffe,” we can say with some resoluteness, would not show up on a cave wall. It does however show up in the second line of this poem. And at this moment, the poem cuts away from our cave to Kansas (later to “the same spot of pantry,” a “bridge and cliff-face,” “fields burnt of cover,” and finally to “the glaciers”) without warning. The poem becomes a collage of minute locations connected by a loose narrative of predation and death—firstly the death of the mammoth, and lastly the presumed death of whatever’s being taken over by the “little creatures.”


Connections between moments in the poem range from a perfectly logical image (“The owls are edging into day, / each wing riding a transparent balloon. / With the fields burnt of cover / prey is too numerous to care for craft.”) to the vaguest sort of philosophizing (“’They like to die together’ you said and it’s true that / suicides take hands on bridge and cliff-face; it’s other / hands that string the noose.”). The mystery in both of these moments, plus the poem’s deep attentiveness to sound, makes the poem a whole of its parts. Sound, in particular, applies a subtle logic to otherwise disparate moments. The “you” and “true” of the latter lines connect aurally with the later, slant-rhymed “noose.” While “other / hands” may be literally responsible for the “noose,” the similarities in sound between this group of words lets on that there may be other ways to understand culpability in the poem. Similarly in the final stanza, the speaker connects the words “said” and “bread,” using the same device to equate a scattering of bread to the words the speaker is using, each word being a piece of the bread scattered “across the glaciers.”


Without saying the poem aims for any of the same things as the old German parable, it’s hard not to remember Hansel and Gretel when the speaker tells us in the final lines “we go across the glaciers scattering bread.” And the three (blind?) mice in the pantry seem built to remind us of a nursery rhyme. The poem only glances in these directions, but as with the first line of the poem, we understand how these moments could fit snugly into a speaker’s psyche (especially one built around language), and how they might come pouring out in a splendid, near-logical mess. They are, after all, the pieces of scattered bread. We can’t know exactly where the breadcrumbs lead, but we are happy to be on the trail.



-The Editors