Taronga Park Zoo In Sydney
The grizzly bear searches for wild honey in a rock. The slightly crazy sway was checking
out his cage front. He had that desperate painted look of a dog bothered by heat. A billion
black flies from a Canadian Rocky summer, had entered his ears with their deep hum.
This time of the year was a bad life for the bear. A swarm streamed out from the huge
angry hive of his head. His old face was bitten by boredom and stress. The brain of the
bear is corrupted meat. The big heartbeat, pounds down like a ship through waves behind
the fading fur. I cannot forgive the zoo for that. Sydney's humid harbour teems with boats
driven crazy by rich kids, and the middle-aged. Taronga Park Zoo locks onto northern
hemisphere animals that have smelt the foreign salt for decades. The wild gulls have
flown past the equatorial birds, papery wings pinned to an artificial rainforest inside a
netted dome, where the trees are dwarfed and never grow. In short flights the birds are
stale inside, stapled through the back like moths to a display board. I do not know their
names. The ignorant crowds form the living bars, that keep me from the animal hearts.
I'm breathing on the glass house of the deaf, their psyches locked onto the flesh of my
throat. Two white tigers slept inside an aquarium filled with light. John said, "did you see
her breath drawing the grass blade in and out?" His little finger bent like a stem. The
sorrow was escaping the great sleep of the tiger. A rhythm goes on forever, inside the cat
aquarium. There is a slow sun travelling across the lines. Clouds are cutting angles,
corners. There is no wind to carry the tiger across her hunting landscapes. There is a
sleeping tiger who must wake up, as a big cat in a glass tank. She was a toddler dreaming
onto a pillow in a dilapidated building in Redfern. There was the fragile bone of John's
finger flexible beneath the flesh, and a huge white tiger who could shift the position of a
grass blade without breaking it. In a different tank an Australian sea lion looped the loop.
She constructed amazing passageways like children using plastic track to zoom their
matchbox cars along. She laid down her smooth grey freeways inside a watery space the
size of a lift. A tragic optimist who came up to the front of the tank to check out humans.
Chlorinated water snorted in and out of her whiskered nostril, as she sought some sense,
but was again disappointed. She was caught between looking for something and giving
up. Her lashed eye glassed over as she twisted tracks through pools, an oceanic
wilderness inside wound itself into knots. There is a pressure buildup along the slippery
wharves of Circular Quay, the hairy ropes burning my fingers raw. The big creaking
ferries have finally dislodged the harbour from Sydney. The green painted boats head out
through The Heads towards the Pacific Ocean. I will not forgive the zoo for the elephant,
for his far-fetched torment. His lengthy sway in every waking moment and when he slept,
thrown sideways like simulated waves inside the seal lion tank. A whiff of ocean from the
harbour persisted and grew strong, as the ferries glided further and further away, while
captive marine mammals circled in parallel swimming pools. At every cage John said,
"that's the worst." It got worse as the day grew longer. I knew that he would not forgive
them for the Andes Condor. "It's a bird that SOARS in high altitudes!" he said, words
rising up inside his throat. The choke of tethered emotions, and the damp finality of
wings that would never meet clouds. A tremendous lonesome bird sat hunched behind
layers of mesh and pipes, a wire cage six feet above its head. Taronga Park Zoo flattened
the Andes. They made that condor crawl. |
