The Zoo

HIS eyes are mournful, but the long lined palm
He thrusts between the bars expects the best.
His old man’s face as innocent as calm,
The beggar puts compassion to the test
And fails. He grips the bars; his painted stare grows
To a brown study framed in dusty fur.
He has a cold. He sneezes, cleans his nose,
Then gravely licks a flexile forefinger.
A pause; the bald mauve hand from which men shrink,
The fingers, strong to clutch, quick to explore,
Again extended, are again refused.
The eyes, poor sorrow’s jewels, seldom wink,
But to his grinning public, as before,
Show endless patience, endlessly abused.

FORMED with the mountains in the Miocene,
Dull sire to the skittish unicorn
A virgin tames, how heavily serene
He stands, this noontime, tendering his horn
To the soiled keeper’s boot-sole. Neither knows
That the rude object offered for caress
Was hunted, like the Grail or like the Rose,
And, crushed, once medicined His Holiness.
The monster moves his head, he does not move
His piggish eyes, his body in its plates
Of leathern armature, stuffed well with grass.
Night was made for wandering and for love,
The day for sleeping: but not here. The gates
Close. The keeper goes. Hours, like ages, pass.

STIFF as her Egyptian counterpart
She stays, on legs of matchstick ivory,
Rigid to hide the racing of her heart,
Though the black boss of her enormous eye
Flames inconsolable. Less like a deer
Than like a freckled girl, her skin’s blanched gold
Drawn over little bones, her head held clear,
She listens, as if breathing were too bold.
A tremor, and she is still. Now sunny peace,
Light as the straw beneath her feet, persuades
Her pulses briefly, till the terror goes.
Whipped by a childish whimsy of release,
She caracoles: a quick bound that evades
The bars. Then drops into a thrilled repose.