There are many poets who have written poems that take place
in or are about zoos.
This is my entry.
At one time, my wife and I lived on 2 acres in the country,
and we had an orchard.
And when all these trees came full with fruit, we had plums,
we had apples, we had pears, we had
all sorts of things that we didn't recognize, really,
and they all came ripe at once.
And being unaccustomed to this, we
had a large windfall and all kinds of bad things left
and we were at a loss of what to do.
We went to the zoo with some.
I found myself there at that time in a very awkward position
and had a sudden startling realization
that I was taking part in a kind of timeless event
that had occurred first in another zoological garden,
the first long, long ago.
And I wrote this poem called "The Fruit Of The Tree."
"With a wall and a ditch between us,
I watched the gate legged dromedary
creak open from her sleep and come headfirst toward me
as I held out three rust mottled tough pears the color of camel.
When I tossed one, she made no move to catch it.
Whatever they eat lies still and can wait.
The roots and sticks, the scrag ends of brambles.
She straddled, dipping her neck.
Gray lips and lavender tongue which
can choose the best of thorns, thrusts the pear to her gullet.
Choking, she mouthed it, her ruminating jaw flung up,
her eyes lashed out.
With a groan, she thrust it down.
And ecstasy swept her down into the ditch
till her chin and her pointed prolonged face sat on the wall.
She stared at me, inventor and founder of pears.
I emptied my sack.
She ate them painfully, clumsy with joy.
Her withers trembling, careless of dust on the bitten
and dropped half, ignoring flies, losing herself
in the pit of her last stomach.
When she gazed at me again, our mouths were both deserted.
I walked away with myself.
She watched me disappear, then with a rippling trudge,
went back to her stable to snort,
to browse on hay, to remember my sack forever.
She'd been used to having no pears, but hadn't known it.
Imagine the hostile runners, the biters of burnouses, coughers
and spitters whose legs can kick at amazing angles.
Their single hump would carry us willingly over dunes
through sand storms and the swirling djinn
to the edges of oases if they, from their waterless,
intractable hearts might stretch for pears."
[APPLAUSE]