I think that female manatees
should be described as womantees,
though some in the humanities
won't like this PC grammar tease.

They're very sleek and most complex,
like humans of the female sex,
and often end up perfect wrecks
when joing those with XY specs.

Their sense of touch comes from vibrissae,
which, in the ocean's deep abyssae
helps every male to find his missy
whenever he is feeling kissy.

With skin as smooth as baby's cheek,
they're sensuous and very chic,
but hardly, I would say, unique,
in water, when the flesh is weak.

The problem that they all are solvin'
while round their lovers they're revolvin'
is would they rather be a dolphin,
or have more fun by goin' golfin.'


Eric Goode writes about Manatees in the NYT, August 29,2006 ('Sleek? Well, No. Complex? Yes, Indeed') :


It is a good thing the manatee has thick skin.
To the dolphins, the whales, the sea otters go the admiring oohs and ahs, the cries of, “How sleek! ” “How beautiful! ”
The manatee, sluggish, squinty-eyed and bewhiskered, is more likely to have its rotund bulk compared to “a sweet potato, ” its homely, almost fetal looks deemed “prehistoric” — terms applied by startled New Yorkers this month to a Florida manatee that made an unexpected appearance in the Hudson River.
Cleverness is unhesitatingly ascribed to the dolphin. But the manatee is not seen leaping through hoops or performing somersaults on command, and even scientists have suspected it may not be the smartest mammal in the sea. Writing in 1902, a British anatomist, Grafton Elliot Smith, groused that manatee brains — tiny in proportion to the animals’ bodies and smooth as a baby’s cheek — resembled “the brains of idiots.”


8/29/06

gershon hepner

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/manatees/