How to Draw Wild Animals

Day 63

Here in the graveyard, bodies fall apart. As they decompose, their changing forms shift the soil and contour the surface into an uneven landscape, the slowly rolling sod being pushed into shape by bodies rolling slowly over in their graves. In my soles, I feel the lumps beneath the grass; I sense the dark and teeming world below. I wonder how long before tendons separate from their bones—and who lets go first? How long before casket wood turns to soil? Does six feet of earth comfort you like a weighted blanket? My eyes scan the rows of headstones and the endless grid of rectangles makes me resentful. Our bodies, in life and in death, bound and boxed in. In childhood, my first drawing book was called How to Draw Wild Animals. Each animal was reduced to simple geometric shapes, then built up like a house over a sequence of six panels. The elephant, for example, was first a scaffolding of triangular ears, oval body, squares for feet. Can the miracle of what an elephant is be approached as a construction project and remain true? How we box ourselves in unawares, even—tragically—in the act of looking. I have heard that elephants are the only other species that bury their dead. They cover their carcasses in dirt and plant material, and they’re known to visit them repeatedly. To touch their bones. To grieve.