“On Becoming a Tiger,” by Lorna Goodison, appeared in MQR’s Fall 1991 issue. It was later collected in Selected Poems (U. of Michigan Press, 1993).
*
The day that they stole her tiger’s-eye ring
was the day that she became a tiger.
She was inspired by advice received from Rilke
who recommended that, if the business of drinking
should become too bitter,
that one should change oneself into wine.
The tiger was actually always asleep
inside her, she had seen it
stretched out, drowsing and inert
when she lay upon her side and stared
for seven consecutive days into a tall mirror
that she had turned on its side.
Her focus had penetrated all exterior
till at last she could see within her
a red glowing landscape of memory and poems,
a heart within her heart
and lying there big, bright, and golden
was the tiger, wildly, darkly striped.
At night she dreams that her mother
undresses her and discovers that, under
her outerwear, her bare limbs are marked
with the broad and urgent striations
of the huge and fierce cat of Asia
with the stunning golden quartz eyes.
She has taken to wearing long dresses
to cover the rounded tail coiling behind her.
She has filled her vases with tiger lilies
and replaced her domestic cat
with a smaller relative of hers, the ocelot.
At four in the morning she practices stalking
up and down the long expanse of the hall.
What are the ingredients in tiger’s milk?
Do tigers ever mate for life?
Can she rewrite the story of Little Black Sambo?
Can a non-tiger take a tiger for a wife?
To these and other questions,
she is seeking urgent answers
now that she is living an openly
tigerly life.
*
Image: Hirshfield, Morris. “Tiger.” 1940. Oil on canvas. MoMA, New York.
