beatrice and choco hang out in the backyard in the evening. i feel like choco's tail is taking on a personality of its own. mark wanted a picture of the tail next to the corn, in order to size the corn, but mark, it might be the other way around. we may never know. bea and choco are key creatures in this zoo. and then there is cyrus, the rabbit, and most recently, his new rabbit friend, the colonel. i guess this is the remaining sense of backyard adventures. and i feel like floundering for words, and figuring out what more there is to say. an-i-mals, daniel would say. the Grenzhund of Grunbein's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Border Dog," are the Grenzganger, "boundary walkers" of Schneider's Wall Jumper. Grunbein de-humanizes this fantasy figure; his dogs are written in memory of Pavlov and all of the laboratory dogs of the medical academy of the Russian armed forces. It seems that this series of poems is perhaps a light attack on the dialectic, since it seems that Grunbein rightly corrects the "Herrn/Sklaven" relationship to "master/dog." But I think what the poems also do is refigure the "frozen" past; the "Frozen dog [Eingefrorener Hund]" of the epigraphic poem, "Brought back to life [Wurde wiederbelebt]" is not alone in his thawing.