Visit To The Zoo

From routine that deafly eats away
Is it the soul with slavering morselling bites:
From howls torn
Out of hours that have no throats, when dawn creeps
Back to her cavern with the unborn day:
From great this, little that: the dust
Hissing beneath the bed:
The silence
Of all the dead:
The abyss: the fat:
We escaped to the hoofed and horned.

The rhinoceros’s armature,
The rodent’s play, the improbable
Giraffe was our delight.
The hippopotamus baby,
Solid, slow, and wide-mouthed as a dredge, showed the delicate
Pinkish grey of a young sunset cloud.
The crested curassow
Wore his huge sapphire as a prince
His caste mark, and the camel bore his hunch
As brother to the dunes.

We stood and stared
At the uncaring eyes of a sphinx-bodied cat.
Egypt sat in his pose who would not stir
More than a pharaoh throned, or
Couchant there, as if he were the form and pressure of the waste.
There was another whose gold thinly
Gleamed in his eyes alone, the rest was black:
So might twin moons ride implacable night.
And one, the ebony-striped, the sulphur-jowled,
Seemed the familiar of a rishi come
Dowvn softly from his savage mountain home.
Further, an infant dragon, neither tame
Nor yet breathing flame,
Perched the little leonine marmoset.

Reality was larger than the dream.
Eden so near a change,
The peacock’s vulgar scream was consolation for
The splendor of his tail.
Translated fabulously from the Orient, from southern opulence,
Jungle, peak, plain,
Like living myths the creatures ranged
Across a landscape framed by skyscrapers and tenements.
Not half at home, they were no sfranger
Than those beseeching them for inklings of
Their kingdoms
And their power
And their glory.
Speechlessly, we too, laughing a little, with what love, what pain,
Told them our story.