Let’s leave this place, hey, this place smells like lions
Why,
in the logical analogy
gazelle to grass as chee
tah to gazelle, should gentle people find
the second term compels the mind
so much more than the first?
Is this our worst
side?
Wide-
eyed, rocking on our heels, we stand
before the cage, stunned
in the strange, vaguely prurient vertigo
one feels, fastened in a gaze that goes
all the way back:
the abacus
of eons
yawns
and clicks, and the gap gapes—avert
the glance! Oh, feel it, our voor
trekker’s vision at sunrise, the old bush-weltanschaung
that dawned into the child at Taung:
an Eden full of spots and stripes
his tribe’s troop
of lost apes
drapes its dreams with, still. … But what attracts
us so, what brings us back
again and again, to cats? Is it the matter of beauty
out of all proportion, the sheerest tribute
to beauty, stomach-wrenching, bullet-
proof, beauty so durable it
can be stuffed?
Tufts
twitch, tails swirl, silky pacings,
purrs, paw-licks. . . . Purpose,
in its purest shape, that’s it! One thought occludes
all others here: the simple, unclouded
intention to feed, free
of dignity,
unfraught
as a flat-
worm closing in on some sweet ort
suspended in what tepid Ordo-
vician ocean thundering our eardrums
even now leaves us dreamy
and passive in the outwash. …
Watch out
the swan-necked
anorectic
lady in thigh-high black cabretta
boots slides by, braided
by a gemstone leash to (what else?) an ocelot
a pace ahead. They oscillate
and disappear. Police
dogs snarl. The palace
eunuchs
nicker
and whinny and brush the prince’s leopard
cub; calipered
between its claws, a hawk-moth vibrates, on
and off. The young prince claps. Dawn
breaks above the cave’s high eaves.
Nobody breathes.
Why
Let’s go, hey. This place smells like lions.
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