Paul Muldoon: The Panther

For what it's worth, the last panther in Massachusetts
was brought to justice
in the woods beyond these meadows
and hung by its heels from a meat-hook
in what is now our kitchen.

(The house itself is something of a conundrum,
built as it was by an Ephraim Cowan from Antrim.)

I look in one evening while Jean
is jelly-making. She has rendered down pounds of grapes
and crab-apples
to a single jar
at once impenetrable and clear:
'Something's missing. This simply won't take.'

The air directly under the meat-hook—
it quakes, it quickens;
on a flagstone, the smudge of the tippy-tip of its nose.


From Madoc: A Mystery (1990). Very clever, very unsolemn, and a commentary on the most solemn of panther poems, by Rilke on the panther in the Jardin des Plantes. Rilke's panther is the imprisoned, inexpressible image; Muldoon's panther is the image become the shadow of a ghost, making things "at once impenetrable and clear."