The Animals in the Zoo Don’t Seem Worried

Looking at the lion behind the plate glass

I wasn’t sure what I was looking at: a lion, OK,

but he seemed to come apart, not literally

I mean, but I couldn’t see him whole:

Mane. Teeth. The slung belly pumping

as he panted and began to roar. His balls

sheathed in fur swaying a little. His tail’s tuft

jerking in an arc like an old-time pump handle

rusted in midair. Somebody or something

I read once said that when Jesus had his vision

of what his father, God, would do to him,

that Jesus could only see pieces of a cross,

pieces of a body appearing through flashes

of sun, as if the body in his vision

was hands looking for feet, a head for a torso,

everything come unmagnetized from the soul:

the lion caught me in his stare not at

or through me but fixated on the great chain

of being that Jesus couldn’t see and that

a zebra might gallop in — black and white stripes

marking longitudes of this world turning

to meat, bloody meat — this vision of an inmate

that Jesus’s father helped to orchestrate by

making a cageless cage with glass instead

of bars — though the lion didn’t seem to care,

he was roaring for his keepers to bring

him food, so everything’s what it should be

if you’re a lion. Nor did the sea lion

seem concerned about having gone a little

crazy, barking incessantly so I could see

the plush, hot pink insides of its throat,

though like the lion through the glass

there’s this distortion, my reflection

I’m looking through that makes me float above

the zoo: and now this silence at closing time

pours like a waterfall in different zones

of silences that, pouring through my head,

surround roaring, barking, human muttering — 

is any of that what being sounds like?

Or is it just animal gasping like what

Jesus must have heard from the thieves

hanging beside him, one damned, one saved?

What was in his heart when his vision

clarified and he saw it was a hand he

recognized that the nail was driving through?