A bearded man on a senior discount
Being pushed in a rented wheelchair
By another bearded senior accompanied
Two small children, cousins, boy and girl,
As they raced through the zoo after dark,
Open this night to display Christmas lights.
The cousins delighted in the lights, the ice
From old snow, good for wicked snowballs,
The parkour possibilities of scrambling up
And jumping from boulders and sculptures.
Most of the animals were invisible—in bed,
Stowed away in warmer interiors, or about
But in the dark. The paths teemed anyway
With visitors here for the display of lights,
And those visitors checked the enclosures
Anyway, for any creatures that might be out:
African lions pacing in the Utah cold,
California sea lions yawning, the bald eagles
Perched at rest, a peacock’s black silhouette.
What was the exact measure of entropy here,
All those creatures evolved over epochs
Blended together here, all those creatures
Carefully extracted, kept separate, well fed,
And mated here? The man in the wheelchair
Considered the brief peculiarity of any zoo
As a biocultural ecosystem. The cousins
Raced each other, enclosure to enclosure.
The old man pushing the wheelchair joked
That the most attractive light in the place
Was the glowing exit sign. A lioness roared.
The peacock shrieked abruptly. On a pillar
In a dark, interior pen, a colobus monkey slept.
Someday, I’ll wager, thought the senior
In the wheelchair, I’ll begin to forget
Strange but ordinary events like this one,
The candied lights against the darkness
In the pens where the incompatibles were kept,
Someday soon, soon and yet not yet.
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