Poems by B.J. Wilson

The Tigers

This was the winter tiger: not the svelte, languorous creature of long grass and jungle pools, but the heavy-limbed sovereign of mountains, snow, and moonlight . . . —John Valiant

by B.J. Wilson

From Canary Spring 2022

B.J. lives in the Coosa River watershed in northeast Alabama.

Siberian tigers, now known as Amur after the river that winds through Russia’s Far East, can get nine-to-ten feet from head to tail, the biggest cats in the world. I’d driven over two and a half hours to see them and, once inside the zoo, I broke into a jog as the globular drops began to fall.

Under the shelter of the tiger exhibit, summer employees gathered in soggy polos. One young man had a walkie-talkie, and an older man with a white pony-tail and handlebar mustache, also a worker, stood alone. Drenched parents and small children made up the rest. On the other side of the window, the tiger lay in the open rain, lightning flickering above her.

The young man with the walkie-talkie entertained. With a small crowd around him, his voice delayed under the enclosure and pounding rain, he talked about the tiger. I’ve forgotten her name: perhaps Bessy or Irene. When he got to the part on how she once crept into the pond and sprang toward the glass before us, these things happened: the tiger slid through the tarn, hidden to her neck, the water riddled with raindrops. Then she emerged into air.

She swang her paws at the glass where a toddler had his back turned. Once parents realized placing their children by the window enticed the tiger, they lined them in a row, inviting a mountain of a predator into their lives.

With all her ferocity and frustration, the tiger bit at the glass as if it were ice, dreaming of an East she’d never see, its blue moonlight gleaming off snow coating the taiga. Parents snatched their children away and sprinted into the rain.

The man with the handlebar mustache rushed to the glass to see if it had cracked. Instead, on the other side of the window, he pointed to a tooth deposited in the mud, root and blood of it, shards of wood around it from where the tiger had bitten into the window frame.

“I guess we can’t let people do that anymore,” he muttered.

The younger man with the walkie-talkie used it, then ushered the rest of us away.

Mass produced wooden tiger heads in the gift shop spooked me, their disembodiment. Key chains with wide tiger eyes and those tiny, pinpointed pupils.

The procession continued, snow cones and elephant rides, summer puddles evaporating, rain dripping from landscaped trees and shrubs along paths with arrows.

As I passed the tiger enclosure on my way to the exit, I noticed that the tooth was gone, as was the female it belonged to, and the new tiger was different. Bigger. Much bigger. Making rounds throughout his plot of replicated earth, he paid me no mind as he passed. He knew they were both entitled to much more, his pugmark in the mud big as a pot lid, as two million years. Streaks of lightning, far off, shattered the sky. Another storm on its way.