...discovering Antarctica, its penguin kings and icy spires... - Marianne Moore

china eyes and furry countenance confront the nymph’s large eyes — gray eyes that now are black, for she with controlled agitated glance explores the insect’s face and all’s a-quiver with significance. It is Goya’s scene of the tame magpie faced by crouching cats. Butterflies do not need home advice. As though the admiring nymph were patent-leather cricket singing loud or gnat-catching garden-toad, the swallow- tail bewitched and haughty,

Maine should be pleased that its animal
is not a waverer, and rather
than fight, lets the primed quill fall.
Shallow oppressor, intruder,
insister, you have found a resister.

You are not male or female, but a plan
deep-set within the heart of man.