'You know what I was,
You see what I am: change me, change me!'
Randall Jarrell

The woman at the Yagiyama Zoo
who approached us when she heard
her language being spoken,
whose children wouldn't understand
if she used her mother tongue -
I couldn't tell where she was from,
surrounded by her local family
living in some nearby town -
the woman at the Yagiyama Zoo
who'd been away too long.

Another Florentine in exile
she unburdened her life story,
told us how she met her husband,
how he brought her home,
here, because they did not hope
to return for years on end -
with pauses, the occasional slip
of grammar as she rummaged
their vulgar tongue for idiom,
a telling word or phrase.

Like birds that know their limit,
won't fly against the mesh
curving over each plumed head,
how far-off she seemed, reflected
'In the eyes of animals...trapped
As I am trapped' - a phrase
that came to mind there in the cold,
while rare birds went from twisted bough
to thick, guano-covered ground
inside this form of air.

Of all the exogamous marriages
changing us, I thought of ours;
of how a love drew me towards,
but withdrew her from those words -
words we use now to describe
beaver couples gnawing their bars,
Suffolk sheep that lyrically bleat
and the woman in the Yagiyama Zoo
spoke not wanting to forget
the dialect of her tribe.

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