Cage #9 Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Your panthers kiss in the dream of helium balloons:
Their lulling tongues drip the sweat of last night’s carcass:
And I can see you reaching up your forearms,
And the vase of your breast inside the loose shirt:
The pearly meat is like a perfect anthill in summer’s sleep,
Your eyes are smiling like a plastic doll coming nearer,
As you climb the chain-link fence that keeps us
In the separate habitats: You will not go unconquered,
As the peacocks fan behind you the majesty of the jade crocodile:
When you leap down in your fevered panting,
And wrestle me into suppliants amidst the sticks and mud
Where I’d been feeding on the penny candies:
Then you take us back to where we were first captured:
In the hot sand dunes in the cradle of the early peninsula:
Where we spread out naked in the nape and the winds,
And you bit my wrist several times in the same place,
Signifying that you were growing tired and soon wanted sleep:
Even then we had no other language,
Except in the engorged junctions where our bodies merged:
And you called me with your needful pressures,
The flowing areolaed press of your lenient opal stems
Before we were both captured and were bound for domestication,
Feeding the tourists’ melting pleasures,
And the unblinking eyes of curious fifth graders out on fieldtrips.