By Randall Jarrell
The saris go by me from the embassies.
Cloth from the moon. Cloth from another planet.
They look back at the leopard like the leopard.
And I….
this print of mine, that has kept its color
Alive through so many cleanings; this dull null
Navy I wear to work, and wear from work, and so
To my bed, so to my grave, with no
Complaints, no comment: neither from my chief,
The Deputy Chief Assistant, nor his chief—
Only I complain…. this serviceable
Body that no sunlight dyes, no hand suffuses
But, dome-shadowed, withering among columns,
Wavy beneath fountains—small, far-off, shining
In the eyes of animals, these beings trapped
As I am trapped but not, themselves, the trap,
Aging, but without knowledge of their age,
Kept safe here, knowing not of death, for death—
Oh, bars of my own body, open, open!
The world goes by my cage and never sees me.
And there come not to me, as come to these,
The wild beasts, sparrows pecking the llamas’ grain,
Pigeons settling on the bears’ bread, buzzards
Tearing the meat the flies have clouded….
Vulture,
When you come for the white rat that the foxes left,
Take off the red helmet of your head, the black
Wings that have shadowed me, and step to me as man:
The wild brother at whose feet the white wolves fawn,
To whose hand of power the great lioness
Stalks, purring….
You know what I was,
You see what I am: change me, change me!
Randall Jarrell, “The Woman at the Washington Zoo” from The Complete Poems. Copyright © 1969, renewed 1997 by Mary von S. Jarrell. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, www.fsgbooks.com. All rights reserved.
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Source: The Complete Poems (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2001)
Poet Bio
Poet and critic Randall Jarrell was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and attended Vanderbilt University, where he received both a BA and an MA. At Vanderbilt, he came under the influence of poet-critics such as John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren, and also became close friends with poet Robert Lowell. His poetry, greatly influenced by W.H. Auden and Robert Frost, often expresses what has been called “the common dialogue of Americans.”
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