Brick Books
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: The knowing animals / Emily Skov-Nielsen.
Names: Skov-Nielsen, Emily, 1989- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200220489 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200220500 | ISBN 9781771315333
(softcover) | ISBN 9781771315357 (PDF) | ISBN 9781771315340 (HTML)
Classification: LCC PS8637.K69 K66 2020 | DDC C811/.6—dc23
Copyright © Emily Skov-Nielsen, 2020
We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program.
The author photo was taken by Peter Taylor.
BRICK BOOKS
487 King St. W.
Kingston, ON
K7L 2X7
www.brickbooks.ca
… and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, “The First Elegy”
Menstromania
Visitation
Waking
Sea Fever
The Morning After
Lying-In
Night Feed
Orbital
Driving Home
Vernal Equinox
Untitled (Oil Paint, House, Peonies, War)
Passage
Naturecultures
Cryptozoology
Photophobic
coded
Mother Earth
Solstice
After Reading a Poem by Rachel Rose
Unblood my instinct, love
Party
Circus
Teenage
Amanita Muscaria
Teenage, Take Two
Volta
Gutter Punk/Mycologist/Muse
Lucida
New Day of Girls
The mind in morning
Portrait of the Poet as a Squirrel
That is the whole
Subcurrent
REM
Emily & Alden
Riddle
Antics
Cross-Country
Going Out
Painting Suburbia
Glimpse of the Hook
Deception
Contact
Worms and Fish
Love Poem
Pillow Talk
Epiphany
Home Alone, June
Ouroboros
Wind Shear
Afterlight
A Rabbit as Queen of the Moon
Art!
Thinking in Texture
Anxiety
Distemper
Dementia
Hospital of the Absurd
The Knowing Animals
Evening Drive, November
Loose and bloody in the bathwater, a crossbred
sea star/sponge/jellyfish of mucosal tissue,
a strand of uterus, a small stringed instrument,
a nest, a tuft of down feather fallen from a bird
in the hand of my body (a hedge sparrow)—
or maybe it’s a knot of spider silk. It is time
spelled out—f-o-u-r weeks to be exact—a shredded page
from a calendar eaten by the moon whose teeth
shine as it bites through my lower abdomen, a pain
lit from the inside like a paper lantern. Yes,
this is what my body has become overnight,
a ranting lunatic of clarity and impulse, dysphoria
and cravings—a bloated hull, red sky at morning,
an eyelid turned inside out, a dauntless sea-craft
crossing waters in an equatorial countercurrent
spurred by monsoon winds, wind spiking
the ocean’s surface like a dragon fruit. My body
is the red rind of a tart, hidden pomegranate,
the air is appetite, tonguing the pulpy seeds
(of what?) inside me, inciting a slow evisceration,
catabolization, breakdown in the bloodstream,
the hemodynamics of the world, its nonstop
pulse searching for the aortic semi-lunar valve
in the arterial tree, a big-tooth aspen perhaps,
yes, that’s the one. Don’t call me hysteric, call me
wisteric, bearing racemes of blue-lilac papilionaceous
flowers and wrist-thick trunks, collapsing latticework.
I’m a head case with an acute associative disorder
tending a garden of hypochondria with offshoots
of violet amnesias, long convoluted tendrils climbing
a trellis of intersecting stakes. I’m a recovering psycho-
somatic somnambulating between the body and the mind,
rebuilding the distance with words until relapsing
into this poem, this unmoored monastery of endometrial
cells adrift, this intertidal ragbag tatter of home, no longer
a home but a memory—far and near, loose and bloody.
Roving through flowering megacities,
fields of sea lavender—carrying a zygote
nearly invisible inside me, while savouring
the soft pornography of this Disneynature
landscape, waiting for Meryl Streep’s voice
to come gliding in, luciferous as always,
draping sublimity, narrating every kill.
I haunt the deer who have come to feed
at the edge of the coastal wood. I fall in with
the flow of animals closing and opening mirrored
doors with a feeling that I’m being followed:
a complicated faith, utopian and disquieting.
For Ava
Night wanes.
The arrow-pointed attention of the nocturnals—
their small, violent eyes fixed
on a lengthening red distance. The hunted
shed their vulnerability with each eastward step;
the sun smoothing its hand along their slackening backs,
the same hand that unswathes the house
from its dark swaddle. Sleep—
the rounded edges of a folded cloth, tucked away,
once more, in a pine-scented cupboard,
still cool but warming.
I wake to the ripple of a full womb,
to an early memory of my mother’s veined wrists
plunging into cloud-like dishwater,
swimming in the unseen.
She lifts a bowl from the murk
that closes up like flesh and reveals
nothing of the other side.
Holds it in both hands, as if it were an infant,
the speechless: one who calls us
back to the wilderness of the unnamed.
Your birth is coming.
Clouds, steel-coloured with rain, loom
over us like gods—unflinching and expectant.
The garden swells with a damp heat, the sky
bends to lick its beaded brow, flexed with lightning.
Welcome the downfall. Whose hands pull us now
through the rivulet, through this spill from heaven
guttering at the foot of the hill?
Herons, down along the marsh, croak with laughter,
catching wind of the histories we tell—
their cousins bearing children in their stout bills.
Not even the rain can know of its aerial beginnings.
Still, I look to you, curled like a question mark inside of me:
Will you be arriving in the mouth of a bird?
From whose throat will you be called forth?