the fossil record
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As my friend Jack and I came upon the leopard
sprawled, after lunching on raw meat, atop a willow-shaded rock,
Jack began to sketch, trying, he said, to capture the leopard
staring, "past the fears of death flicking at the zoo."
Jack also drew a polar bear as it awoke on its lumpy granite bed,
mouth open, hairy thick legs spread, arms rising, "taking sunlight
as a lover." I grew a bit jealous of Jack for his having the eyes
of that ancient natural philosopher who asked in the marketplace,
"Which Wind fathered the butterflies?" upon observing a meadow's
dancing butterflies suckle on the flowers days after an itinerant wind
bent those flowers on their slender stems and scattered seeds.
One day in the park, as Jack cried "Male Blackburnian
at 2 o'clock!" I looked up searchingly, and soon the warbler
at the tip a white-spruce branch joined the small circle
of my binoculars: he wore a dandyish cap, orange
as the sun; his eyebrows seemed arching
as-orange brush strokes over the black Zorro eye mask,
as if he flew North in a Mardi Gras getup.
* *
Separated and broke for a time, I'd bunked on Jack's couch.
One night, believing me asleep, he and Anna,
a tall lithe dancer from Canada, sprawled on the rug before a nature
special on the TV screen: a bull elephant was initiating foreplay.
As the delicate curly black lashes on the cow's lowered head
floated up the dark nectar of her eyes, the bull slid the fleshy nub
of his trunk along her colossal back. ('Dance, Miss?') And so forth
until 5'2" Jack (who fired metal into 8' polar-bear high abstractions
of the ancient behemoths that grazed his sleep's outback)
turned his head to Anna with a roguish confidence.
Anna flew north after Jack died, but from time
to time I see: over the Oriental rug their V-spread legs
crossing. Then Anna's supple bare foot crawls up Jack's back
crunching his shirt up towards his neck like molted skin
revealing his smooth-skinned hard rounded back
while the two elephants continue their foreplay.
Are our eyes the kingdom's solitary, contemplative princes?
Allan Kaplan