Barnum’s Animal Crackers

The animals have been trapped for generations
in this sunny caravan with four flat wheels.
No matter how well the cub pedals his unicycle
while juggling, Barnum never opens the doors

on his ark. There he is on the roof, barking
through a bloody megaphone, calling us to behold
beasts of jungle and tundra, forest and veldt
and ocean, this priceless menagerie of the exotic,

step right up, there’s a cracker born every minute!
The antelope and camel look blase, the walrus
startled in his second-story cell with no water.
Alligator and panther bare keen teeth, as trained.

And that’s not all, folks, there’s much more!
barks Barnum’s dapper twin. Just roll back the top
and taste the peaceable kingdom preserved inside,
the lion and the lamb recumbent with the leopard,

the delectable heads and tails of quadrupeds
that might be rhinos or bears, it’s hard to tell
when the cookie’s crumbled like a sandstone tablet—
but it doesn’t matter, they all taste so sweet!

And now we know why the animals look so sullen
in this flimsy purse we can swing on a string,
in this brick we can eat like fairy-tale termites,
in this portable cardboard altar of extinction:

they know that their only way out is through us,
these gods we melt on our disbelieving tongue
as the calliope whistles and the long whips snap
and the pawpads measure the edge of the cage again.