Bestiary

It is upon this hill that he will found
a marble-fronted, mud-backed city-state
whose every hour comes ten minutes late,
whose brackish swampland is the solid ground,
whose gun-shy guard dogs skitter at the sound
of dining chairs scraping on a hardwood floor
or the distant slam of someone’s bedroom door,
a cat’s meow, a watch’s beep; around
the city is a park; within the park a zoo
within which lives one white rhinoceros,
majestic, brooding, grand, ridiculous,
last of his species, nothing much to do
but pace and eat and shit and grumble through
the years until he dies of loneliness.