Buffalo calf by Katherine Pierpoint
A buffalo-calf, beautiful, lies asleep under the water-tap.
A calf, bright oil-drum black, blissful, at hot roost,
front legs folded in the shitty mud,
and eyes rolled back,
smiling hugely -
he's a deformed fairy,
or drugged, ecstatic dragon, landed half-on, half-in the earth.
Dripped on,
he sucks, eyes shut, all day, on that one sensation.
A slow, kohl-eyed cow walks by, to her daily fieldwork in the rice,
but dressed in the tassels, paint, and tin bells of a dancer -
she's made more beautiful each moment through her movement.
A temple elephant too. The surprise of it  -  in town! at church!  -
for an elephant is its own cathedral.
Even thinking of an elephant
is architecture, elaborate; a plain hugeness at first disguising the subtleties there;
and there it stands and stands, and stands, at the busy temple gate,
little as a lap-dog
against the mounting pyramid of stones,
the mass of carvings, the unending, up-ending sex,
the linked aeons of miracles.
Polka-dot flowers and river deltas chalked across her steep forehead,
as if bringing out her private depths and cliffs of thought,
the bright hibiscus in there, the mudfields, long bathes;
and she sways, bored, bored, bored,
leaning this way and that against the air.
· First published Poetry London