Watching Gators at Ray Boone’s Reptile Farm

While we stand behind the concrete railing
and yellow cockatoos cry through mosquito heat,
the gators never move,
but look like floating logs almost ready to sink,
wait as though long patience reminded them of something
about humans,
an old voice crying from the swamps of our brain.

Once that cry called a small boy
over the railing and the logs came alive.
A black man in a Bush hat salvaged the legs.
On the bottom of the pool
Ray Boone found a shrunken white hand clutching a stone.

Our hands clutch concrete as we lean against the railing
as though leaning might bring us closer
to that voice crying now through our common memory,
the answer to all the animal inside us.