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.

Source: Poetry (November 1949)