Bronx Zoo
A back-bend over the vault of years, hurtling backwards through an arch—the concrete arch of a city zoo. A detour, re-tour, an arrow sent back to the first bowstring that held me in utter fascination. Suffused in the blur of early childhood memories, I recall the habitual pilgrimage, almost religious, those daily visits to The Bronx Zoo. It was just 6 blocks from my family’s apartment, and my mother took me there, in a regular rhythm, through the magical portal of the early years of my life, because it kept my attention and she didn’t know what else to do with me. Years and years of formative experience in captivity and dependency.
I learned about reflection there at the zoo, and about distortion, projection and punishment, wordless communication from a heartless world of incarceration, and the magnificence and longing received through osmosis, gathered in my hot closed fists. Captured there for a lifetime, burrowed silent inside me for decades, I open my hands and it all comes back.
The powerful smell of the elephants. The dusty darkness of the monkey house cages. The muted roars of the big cats. Massive birds and huge snakes behind bars. Captivate means to delight. But there, de-light meant to take the light away. In the stink of their excrement, their numbed souls scorched inside restless, thwarted bodies, reaching for some memory of freedom in vain behind the steel enclosures, I tasted the misery and insanity of my culture. Not for the first time.
Dilapidated souls, abraided spirits. I saw myself through the fluttering lights dying in their eyes, and their vivid shadows played in my dreams. I was taught by professionals to call this entertainment, or education, or an ark, and back at the apartment where I was caged in my own monkey house with my mother, there were bars on all the windows behind where we waited for my father to come home and feed us something. To clang through all those steel locks on the door. We were his possessions, his ark and his castle; he’d planted his flag and left us there in our occupied, intangible lands. But we all three languished in our cages, violated shadows of our possible freedom, the secret stories of our chop-shop modifications, and how we were made to be this deformed.
And I didn’t see the hunts, the mass-murder expeditions, where professional men captured—first, the babies—killing every adult in the herd, pack, pride that would stop them from their exotic zoo prizes. Didn’t rise up in witness of the mortality that followed, the sacrifice of older zoo animals to make room for the more valued babies. The vivisection labs, private hunting ranches, circuses that took the aged ones on to complete the torture till at last their suffering ended. Now I know there are cycles like this that never end, far from our eyes and consciences, as we gaze through the bars at the spectacle of our superiority. I was a child, pressed by forces, exotic and domestic. I was a sponge with no power, then.
I learned paradox early on because I loved the zoo; thrilled to be in the presence of real wild animals. And I hated the zoo because I saw these beloveds up close day after day, and I felt the intensity of their suffering. And so I learned as a child to slide greased through my confusion into denial, numbness, selfish pleasures, while my instincts and empathy bled away into my excitement at an elephant ride. And I struggle to find my way back through that hypnotic swaying, the familiar-as-my-childhood room, to the mazes of cages, the flies and the stink to some living image of our original perfection. I was a lonely-only child in that barred room before I had you. I will forever-more refuse that bloody lie of an ark and the darkness that surrounds us now, separated as we are from all the cosmos. I never went to another zoo again.
And that bottomless loneliness still lives inside my grown-up hide—rides me down as I pace all sped-up by the television, sugar, personality disorders and other madnesses that formed me, deformed me to fit inside the tight boxes and caged minds of my kind. Expected to take refuge in abstraction, I can no longer pretend. Bad food and concrete cages. Good food and concrete canyons can never substitute for freedom or relationship.
This morning I send prayers out to the souls of all my old friends there, on the inside—surely all dead by now and moved on. I send effigy traces into spaces where they once were led astray, eroding far away, disintegrating before the human gaze, like I was. Oh my friends, how I loved you! How I dreamed of your salvation, and my own.
In memory of all this, I want to say You are indelible in me. You who saved my young life so very long ago. I remember You.
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