Christmas Eve at the Zoo

 

Christmas Eve at the Zoo

Elephants, your favorites, are knocking
at the door to the elephant house. How does
an elephant knock? Hard. With trunk.

It’s cold out here.
I squeeze your little hand.
A baby wallaby studies us from mother’s pouch.
Wrapped in my coat against my legs,
you study back.

Giraffes make passes at an open door
but their bodies are a collection
of angles and the door is quite specific.
I call to them, “Watch your head!”
You lift your eyes upward, then sideways and say
“How can they watch their own heads?”

In the monkey house one gorilla
stares blankly at a television, Gilligan’s Island
while another turns his back and regurgitates
which is how I would feel, too.

I wonder, “Do they want to hang stockings?”
You say, “Not all animals celebrate Christmas.”
Then you add: “Just like people.”

Already you understand:
    we go to the zoo
    to see ourselves.

......

First published in Storyteller Poetry Review. Thank you editor Sharon Waller Knutson.
Photo by Joseph C Boone