Plump Skink I Think

I was used to skinks
from the Sierra Nevada--
thin lizards, flashes
of liquid blue and black,
gone to brush in a blink.

So this gray-brown,
blue-tongued skink
I saw draped over
a zoo-keeper's hand
had me staring. Body
like an obese gila monster's.
Chubby back legs. Tiny
forward flailings were
only almost arms. Blue
Tongue had a mock-croc
top of the head, sincere
eyes, and--from an unseen
place of coiling, a long
lingual lariat of blue, a book-mark
in one of Evolution's
favorite volumes.

That tongue, it scares
off predators. Mr. BT
cracked that azure whip
a lot and spun its almost-
arms. Protested in
the zoo-keeper's soft hand.
To no avail. He became morose.
So did we. Empathy.
We moved on and the keeper
returned BT to small
heaven of privacy somewhere
on the grounds, somewhere
in the millions of skink years.


hans ostrom 2020

Zzzzzzoooo

We went to the zoo today, chiefly to see someone who works there. While we were there, we looked at a few exhibited creatures. The lemurs looked like they'd been up all night, drinking caffeine and writing term-papers. In fact, pretty much all the creatures looked weary. It was late in the day, after all, and a humid day, too. The elephants looked very sleepy, but they also looked as if they felt lying down would require too much work. For an elephant to lie down is a bit like a building dismantling itself.

The tapirs were doing well. They seemed to have joined together in a civil union, and physically, they seemed to prefer to stand in a kind of parallel position. They wore matching fur outfits.

The Sumatran tiger was completely out of it, sleeping deeply, not even a flick of the tail.

I liked the empty exhibits. You walk up and look through the glass or over the fence, and there's no creature in particular there. It's as if someone took a great deal of trouble to create a space for absence. So you stand there and start to observe other people, who are, after all, inside the zoo, just like the other animals. Maybe they could employ a poet to sit in one of those empty spaces. The sign could say something like "Poet--Hominid," and people could take pictures of the person as he or she wrote a word and then erased it.

Crows at a zoo behave in an even more superior fashion than they do elsewhere, it seems. They hang around tables at a cafe, pretending to be customers, and they're all full of themselves about not being on exhibit, or part of the paying public, or part of the paid staff.

I saw the father of two young children buy two brightly colored cloth snakes for the kids. While he was purchasing the second one, his wife, mother-in-law, and kids sat a a table nearby. Referring to the kid who already had a snake, the wife yelled, "He just tried to make the snake kill my mother!" Then she laughed. So did the mother, who's apparently not afraid of cloth snakes or her grandchildren. I don't know, though. I might keep an eye on that one kid if I were her. The dad seemed moderately amused by the cloth-attempt on the mother-in-law's life.