ZOOS, ETC. (moldy oldy 1980s through 90s)

1.

Like he's been told, a circus bear (retired) paws some sky,
and gathers to his mouth like more honey some space.
Since his mismatched hand-claps cannot summon food,
it's wise he stops the trick -- even while the slack-jawed
gather to the barrier of chainlink. Make them pay
thinks a bear, if we can credit to him words as tasty
as what he balances in his half-clutched paw.

Perhaps with summer's arrival he will drop the sky,
which then will roll on concrete in a bundle. Maybe
he will not retrieve it, his forgetfulness defiance.
The paws that will clap to absent trainers push
against bars or try to maul the over-adventurous,
or in the absence of an easy target slap himself
like an angry, clumsy child who can't win a game.

In a tumult of standing water he will drop himself
and shatter algae membranes that heave with him.
If only he could crawl into his cave completely
then he could die awhile, shut eyes, and disappear
like children think when they play hide-and-seek
to find that sight is not their own: the recess
of rock blown into Prospect Park is bright as day.

2.

Off-white, from his water-hole, surges the polar bear
one borough away, revealing through slick fur
a squandered musculature. He should be chasing
the arctic seal who leaps a water slide
to roars, then noses a beach-ball on an island,
a little plexiglass glacier no bear could mount,
and which the sun converts to gem-like fire

refractory, cold and blinding, white--
as if syntax had to shatter into facets of fire
to describe it. But the arctic seal slips off
the island shyly, after applause has died.

Old people in wheelchairs shoved by daughters,
children wheeled too, the ages in-between walking--
what interests them in this soiled spectacle,
boredom ebbing into age, power unpracticed, lost
in excrement and melting ice and dead fish
while Ursus Major noses carrion of light through space?
On nearby beaches later, mounds of jellyfish
toes touch by the waterline are condoms, really.

Only in the Bronx Zoo dangles the Kodiak's tongue
like that of a sled-dog. Having, post coitus,
rolled from his mate, earthward he staggers
to his reconstructed habitat: a seeded field
surrounds a plastic maypole that from tiny pores
oozes honey that is oxidizing into foam.