In The Dead Zoo

They’ve taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up
An astounding crate full of air.
– Seamus Heaney

Aflame with antlers,
almost tapping the ceiling, a roof-raiser
bursting with sex and death.

Should we view it from over or under –
stand on the tiled floor
or the tundra?

*

More inscrutable than the Sphinx:

the trophy-head of a rhino
shot and stuffed over a century ago

by Colonel Spinks.

*

Where is he,
my frog-hunting, 12 year old self,
soft-eyed hoarder
of Wildlife magazines, dogged haunter
of ditches and bogs?

*

DO NOT TOUCH

the rhino’s tarry flesh
just yet –

wait for the rat kangaroo
and the parchment bats

to undo.

*

Here, touching what
he should not:
an elephant’s cunt,
a wound
in an old coat.

*

How to fade
from a dazzling op-art zebra
into just that shade
of sepia.

*

Upstairs, along the galleries,
dust-coloured moths and butterflies

(ribbons from an antique war)
recall the killing jar,

though one or two
flash – forget-me-not blue


*

Or here, this boy who holds
to his hiding place among
the grown-up coats hung
in a glass wardrobe.

*

Creaking Victorian ark
whose hold is a maze
of mirrors, our faces
float over the glass
eyes of your great
and less great apes,
your frozen tableaux
(white hares in the snow
from a snow globe),
libraries of learned
dust which is not returned.

*

The Fin Whale’s skeleton,
suspended on wires, swims
overhead. Its mammal spine
(black against fogged glass)
is an x-ray that might pass
for all of us.