Poetry | December 01, 1980
Poetry Feature: Maxine Kumin
Maxine Kumin
Featuring the poems:
Anger
The Poets Observe the Absence of God from the St. Louis Zoo
The Poets Observe the Absence of God from the St. Louis Zoo
November, that time of year the Lord
created and forgot, the big cats lurk
diminished in the mouths of their manmade caves.
Most of the pink has been bleached
from the huddled flamingos. The camels squat
over the nests of their folded legs.
To this place the aging poets, old friends,
neither quite dressed for the morning chill,
come flailing their arms in thin sunlight.
They stroll through the kingdom of roars and smells,
they shelter in the murk of the Aquarium,
peer into the mouths of ancient sea turtles,
follow the bursts of minute tropical fish
but do not raise the eternal questions:
Is utility the one criterion
for creation? Does form follow function?
Neither chooses to cite the neck
of the giraffe, the rhinoceros’s horn.
Nothing is said of the opposable thumb
by means of which in the next pen a muscular
attendant in souwester and boots
force feeds dead fish to the penguins,
cramming the smelts headfirst like grain
being tamped down the craw of a Strasbourg goose.
O Deus absconditus, the tamed
formal birds, glutted for the day
and balancing without shoulders, waddle
about their confines. Each of the poets
notes how helpless the natty creatures look,
how that in itself is pathetic fallacy.
They move on, arms wrapped round each other’s backs.
Both are writing this poem in their heads
in a tight-lipped month between extreme weathers
while their lives speed by like outbound traffic.
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