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| Eugenia
Macer-Story |
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Zoo Tour:
the Dragon
Mind
On the zoo tour, large animals slept Depressed or over-confident in the morning sun Others, deep in rigged underbrush, not to be seen So early in the day as captives. The rhinoceros iguana, perhaps telepathic, Sensed I was at the glass of its grotto Came forward from behind the artificial rocks Presented its tail & spread out comfortably in white sand Like a fat bimbo stranded on the Riviera Also the Komodo dragon, similarly displaying flesh Emerged flicking forked tongue from behind a zoo rock Meeting my eyes through the glass As did the snow white Aruba rattlesnake Coiled tight with head proudly raised Jet eyes striking directly at the rigid glass Fierce world turtle without a shell Waiting for heaven’s clear barrier to crack Small universe held on the softly rigid back. I will not say your venom did not bridge the cosmic gap As I was writing these picnic notes The live peacock had silently come (toy bird) Looking for food round the table as a decoy For often the peacock’s haughty parade & feast Draws the crows’ overflight for bitter crumbs As strong medicine carried somehow on the wind Peppers my sunlit eyes from zoo’s darkish dens Later trapped in night’s spherical mirror I spit into the distant window which holds the stars Within the constellations we know as restricted facades Dragon’s blood seeded deep within my heart |
Academic analysis
”here there be dragons” inscription on an old sea chart The balloon man in reverse parachute Suspended at the window By canvas straps beneath the armpits Silently photographs the solo lecture Ascending into nowhere strategic In the stratospheric rainbow. The shadow painted infusing geometric Arrangements of hollow cylinders Rises from within regular structure With the head of an eel as the professor Identifies flat worm’s shape as “phallic design” But not, certainly, a human organ, in the abstract As the balloon man in reverse parachute Extracts this memory from seeping concrete Before the building collapses, burying icons Of the flat, shell-less snail alive amid copper pylons Perhaps as a thin image of fog melting into shifting waters Becomes an eel in the depth of violent oceans Rising through the surface to explode Through tight canvas abstracts like a serpent’s head From the still pond, miraculous As the balloon man reaches through the geodesic window Trying to grasp evidence of life in the abstract Slipping eel-like into the deep marsh of time The balloon is a clever bathysphere Suspended at the entrance to sunken tunnels Running like old arteries into the inaccessible heart of the planet Where the shadows of eels curl about deep secret fire Beneath the ruined foundations of geometric desire. | |
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