The Animals in the Zoo Don’t Seem Worried

Looking at the lion behind the plate glass I wasn’t sure what I was looking at: a lion, OK, but he seemed to come apart, not literally I mean, but I couldn’t see him whole: Mane. Teeth. The slung belly pumping as he panted and began to roar. His balls sheathed in fur swaying a little. His tail’s tuft jerking in an arc like an old-time pump handle rusted in midair. Somebody or something I read once said that when Jesus had his vision of what his father, God, would do to him, that Jesus could only see pieces of a cross, pieces of a body appearing through flashes of sun, as if the body in his vision was hands looking for feet, a head for a torso, everything come unmagnetized from the soul: the lion caught me in his stare not at or through me but fixated on the great chain of being that Jesus couldn’t see and that a zebra might gallop in — black and white stripes marking longitudes of this world turning to meat, bloody meat — this vision of an inmate that Jesus’s father helped to orchestrate by making a cageless cage with glass instead of bars — though the lion didn’t seem to care, he was roaring for his keepers to bring him food, so everything’s what it should be if you’re a lion. Nor did the sea lion seem concerned about having gone a little crazy, barking incessantly so I could see the plush, hot pink insides of its throat, though like the lion through the glass there’s this distortion, my reflection I’m looking through that makes me float above the zoo: and now this silence at closing time pours like a waterfall in different zones of silences that, pouring through my head, surround roaring, barking, human muttering — is any of that what being sounds like? Or is it just animal gasping like what Jesus must have heard from the thieves hanging beside him, one damned, one saved? What was in his heart when his vision clarified and he saw it was a hand he recognized that the nail was driving through?