The Zoo Wheel of Knowledge

FOR CHRISTOPHER BRAM AND DRAPER SHREEVE

The difficulty to see at the end of the day:

she’s sprinkling flour in the bronze light,

he’s spooning apricots into our infant,

and Star, marauder of the yards and alleys,

is sleeping in the next room, wiggling

on his haunches, ears flapping, his red eyes

in a dream rushing away with their catch,

his tongue a spear in our hearts.

How strange to hear in the fading sun

the little girls from Sacred Heart scream

and rush against each other when the lions

in the park let go their convulsive roar,

awakening in us, as with the addict,

a spasmlike hunger to please the beast.

So we set off, all of us, guiding out stroller,

the baby’s head floating before us through

the dark, arctic tanks where the bears

glide, monsterlike yet sultry,

their eyes opening, brown as Mother’s,

at the viewing window, their phosphorescent

trunks so white and godlike

a neighbor’s sons, one night, scaled the wall

to dive and kick among them.

Pity the poor beasts, weary, gazing upward—

except the congress of bats asleep in its cave—

as if at the stars that mirror them

in constellation: Pavo, the peacock;

tough-skinned Leo; the gold-fleeced ram;

Aquila, the eagle; even little Lepus, the hare,

whom all the children pet at the petting station.

Whatever happens to them, mishap or fortune,

is as well for us with downy fur on our spines.

Each child freezes them in Kodak—

above us the ape’s lips are cracked and bleeding,

his pink tits pumped up from swinging

in the canopy—and therefore ourselves

in rendezvous this first light of evening,

as if at a pageant or crazy fantasia

of the unconscious where we all collect

eventually, even Star and the souls

of the boys found in the polar tank,

all of us writhing in a kind of heroic

remembering of what our natures are—

the unspeakable resemblance, the distant

mother tongue—though the cage bars

frame us apart. The gold eyes

look outward, nearly bodiless in the dim light,

as if in that halcyon moment when bison, herding,

lift their flecked heads all at once toward

the hills, knowing they’ll take possession.

Oh, Lord, make us sure as the beasts

who drink from the pond, their shaggy manes

dappled with air; who see those that flee

from them, yet wait and breathe accustomed

to the night; and who listen tirelessly

for grasses to blow on the plain again.