Between two pages
of the Master's unparalleled illustrations
of American wildlife
there is a double spread
portraying in wonderful detail
a duck-billed sheep.
No one has ever explained it.
The Master was not otherwise given
to flights of fantasy.
His work,
though sublime in many ways,
was rigorously literal.
Was it a sudden need
to break out,
just as someone else
might become a mercenary
join a dance troupe
or build a folly?
Or a desperate attempt
at humour,
a bid, perhaps
to charm a woman
of whom we know nothing?
It works for peacocks,
why not for zoologists?
But the woman
whose heart will be melted
by a picture of a duck-billed sheep
has yet to appear
on the world's stage.
That said,
it is a fine picture.