Isaac Cates Hedgehog Variations 1.
It pats the microphone with tiny palms.
The hedgehog entertains some questions from
the floor: ... your natural diet, and advice
for your domestic care? Your quirks, dislikes,
and hobbies? Please reveal what makes you tick.
It prickles, but its spines cannot deflect
our curiosity. The probing paw
gets hurt, but then it only wants to know
the secrets of what hurt it. Who hasn’t been
enthralled by shyness, charmed by reticence?
Perhaps we could encourage you to speak
about your work? The scared instinctive squeak
becomes an oracle; the shar-pei frown
reads as consideration, not alarm.
2.
The woman at the masquerade in furs
tricked out with still-sharp bamboo satay skewers—
who (having burst the pectoral balloons
of costume Hercules and Marilyns
and having punctured, inadvertently,
a gargoyle’s styrofoam grotesquerie)
insists the hedgehog is no porcupine
and is to nothing as the pangolin
is to the artichoke—would not deny
a certain pleasure in putting on the spines
for festive nights, implying both a wrong
and a right way the friendly hand may run.
3.
The Queen of Hearts, for all her grumbling,
excels in many sports, though not croquet.
Haphazard, she sends hedgehogs tumbling
beyond the court and farther still astray.
Forbidden to unroll (on pain of death),
uncertain of his whereabouts, and dizzy,
one snuffles cautiously, then holds his breath:
outside her purview, free, and still uneasy.
His sense of this new liberty dawns dimly.
But since he’s just a stone’s throw from the wild,
he pads beneath the garden’s last fence primly
and finds himself to nature reconciled,
renouncing minor courtly privileges
for slovenly rootbeds, furze, fresh hedges.