Why We Go to Zoos

Noah Leznoff
From:   Why We Go To Zoos. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 1997.

So I'm at Marine Land, Sea World,
some oxymoron of place, having
come down
the quiet stairs to watch the
two white whales from underneath,
and the crowd's a dark conundrum
of shadow before the turquoise
glass -- beanpoles, I discern now,
elbows in safari shorts clicking
Pentaxes like there's no
tomorrow, wide hard women
wiping kids who drip sugar
cream from their hands
and chins,
and these belugas, these
mother-fucking big
fish,
are passing back and forth in
front of us. And
they're all white muscle,
all soft marble, smooth rubber,
and I want to touch them
like horses,
and their foreheads
are square and quizzical and their
eyelids have human
wrinkles,
and,
I swear,
they're grinning. Like they know
they're ostensible mythologies
or something.

But some ... other colour,
a curlicue, tendril,
worming from the integument, flap,
  then more and more to a fully protracted
  (holy shit) hooked fleshtone
dick flubbering through the water,
a viscid, shaggy animal
  in its own right,
   thin gel rinsing from
it, like heat rippling
  the air. And the big
grin sweeps wide and
bumps her, straining
to roll her, throwing
with everything:
spine, tail,
flanks ivory and hard,
a pounding like no grace
   on earth.

  I'm thinking Holy fuck...
'cause the whales alone are
enough, but now they're almost
screwing inches from my nose; the female's
so white and big, turning
pressed against the glass so close I can lick her;
the male's rubbing into
her, working to nudge
  under her tailside
and she's wriggling
her goddess backside, shaking her cetaceous
booty, rolling
like a cloud,
and she's beautiful and white
and she's taut and smooth and white,
smiling hard against the glass
and an elbow's jabbing hard
into my ribs, Liz is hitting me
'cause now I'm shouting HOLEE FUCK!
at the top of my lungs and this sudden
silence and echo
and the lens-heads are shushing
their kids the hell
  out of there, or fumbling with film
canisters, and the glass might break,
and the cock is slippery and grinning
and she cuts at the last
second, glides to the far
blue wall, circling

and the cock, the cock is after her
and the cock jazz shivering through the water
and the cock much bigger than my own
(no less pink, cock-serious) and
the male's eyes serious
and against her his whole musculature's
quivering like a
leaf.

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Noah Leznoff's works copyright © to the author.