Eugenia Macer-Story		Zoo Tour: the Dragon Mind                       On the zoo tour, large animals slept               Depressed or over-confident in the morning sun   Others, deep in rigged underbrush, not to be seen               So early in the day as captives.   The rhinoceros iguana, perhaps telepathic,               Sensed  I was at the glass of its grotto   Came forward from behind the artificial rocks               Presented its tail & spread out comfortably in white sand   Like a fat bimbo stranded on the Riviera               Also the Komodo dragon, similarly displaying flesh   Emerged  flicking forked tongue from behind a zoo rock               Meeting my eyes through the glass   As did the snow white Aruba rattlesnake               Coiled tight with head proudly raised   Jet eyes striking directly at the rigid glass               Fierce world turtle without a shell   Waiting for heaven’s clear barrier to crack               Small universe held on the softly rigid back.   I will not say your venom did not bridge the cosmic gap               As I was writing these picnic notes   The live peacock had silently come (toy bird)               Looking for food round the table as a decoy   For often the peacock’s haughty parade & feast               Draws the crows’ overflight for bitter crumbs   As strong medicine carried somehow on the wind               Peppers my sunlit eyes from zoo’s darkish dens   Later trapped in night’s spherical mirror               I spit into the distant window which holds the stars   Within the constellations we know as  restricted facades               Dragon’s blood seeded deep within my heart		Academic analysis                                                                ”here there  be dragons”                                                           inscription on an old sea chart   The balloon man in reverse parachute                                       Suspended at the window                           By canvas straps beneath the armpits                                       Silently photographs the solo lecture                           Ascending into nowhere strategic                                       In the stratospheric rainbow.                           The shadow painted infusing geometric                                       Arrangements of hollow cylinders                           Rises from within regular structure                                       With the head of an eel  as the professor                           Identifies flat worm’s shape as “phallic design”                   But not, certainly,  a human organ, in the abstract                           As the balloon man in reverse parachute                          Extracts this memory from seeping concrete                           Before the building collapses, burying icons               Of the flat, shell-less snail alive amid copper pylons   Perhaps as a thin image of fog melting into shifting waters                     Becomes an eel in the depth of violent oceans                           Rising through the surface to explode             Through tight canvas abstracts like a serpent’s head                           From the still pond, miraculous   As the balloon man reaches through the geodesic window                    Trying to grasp evidence of life in the abstract                            Slipping eel-like into the deep marsh of time                           The balloon is a clever bathysphere                     Suspended at the entrance to sunken tunnels           Running like old arteries into the inaccessible heart of the  planet      Where the shadows of eels curl about deep secret fire                                    Beneath the ruined foundations of geometric desire.