The snout is delicate, snuffling, pursuing the peanut and

extending further. Considering.

Two bouts of hot exhalation,

saluting, curling around the twin-nuggets

of the peanut shell and bringing the small woody legume to a mouth

like a secret smile and then the exchange is done.

No more, nothing else to give.

But nonetheless the prehensile

poke-holes breathe, trespass on my shirt front and shoulder,

and gently, shockingly softly, cross my face.

The elm-tree wrinkles around his eyes are equalled by

seams throughout his girth.

The eyes are so small, the feet so flat and ponderously right exactly there,

and shifting unalterably in the following new position,

so weightily emphatic that

the manure just dropped on the sidewalk

is instantly trodden to flat, golden soil.

Even his shadow takes a long heart-beat

to shift and flow, passing with his keeper’s

metal prod as the weather passes, climate

altering as the world settles on.

And yet he turns back, half a planet taking a long moment

in apparent curiosity at a stranger’s bounty, wondering if

another gift might be in the offing,

so fully present, so immediately searching

with his ears shrugging upward like awnings and his skin

flowing with the argument of

muscles over his bones, that nothing can happen, now,

nothing but this great animal’s wonder.