Zoo-keeper's Wife

I can stay awake all night, if need be ---

Cold as an eel, without eyelids.

Like a dead lake the dark envelops me,

Blueblack, a spectacular plum fruit.

No air bubbles start from my heart. I am lungless

And ugly, my belly a silk stocking

Where the heads and tails of my sisters decompose.

Look, they are melting like coins in the powerful juices ---

The spidery jaws, the spine bones bared for a moment

Like the white lines on a blueprint.

Should I stir, I think this pink and purple plastic

Guts bag would clack like a child's rattle,

Old grievances jostling each other, so many loose teeth.

But what so you know about that

My fat pork, my marrowy sweetheart, face-to-the-wall?

Some things of this world are indigestible.

You wooed me with the wolf-headed fruit bats

Hanging from their scorched hooks in the moist

Fug of teh Small Mammal House.

The armadillo dozed in his sandbin

Obscene and bald as a pig, the white mice

Multiplied to infinity like angels on a pinhead

Out of sheer boredom. Tangled in the sweat-wet sheets

I remember the bloodied chicks and the quartered rabbits.

You checked the diet charts and took me to play

With the boa constrictor in the Fellow's Garden.

I pretended I was the Tree of Knowledge.

I entered your bible, I boarded your ark

With the sacred baboon in his wig and wax ears

And the bear-furred, bird-eating spider

Clambering round its glass box like an eight-fingered hand.

I can't get it out of my mind

How our courtship lit the tindery cages ---

Your two-horned rhinocerous opened a mouth

Dirty as a bootsole and big as a hospital sink

For my cube of sugar: its bog breath

Gloved my arm to the elbow.

The snails blew kisses like black apples.

Nightly now I flog apes owls bears sheep

Over their iron stile. And still don't sleep.