James Tate\'s Return to the City of White Donkeys

¶ … Zebra in the Room

Wore a purple dress. It matched my shoes

Which I bought the other day at Macy's.

The zebra said, "Why don't you have some dessert?"

To which I responded that I was getting fat.

"When I was a kid," the zebra said,

"I was fat." He left it at that and finished his cake.

But he did not shut up because he had something to say. The zebra talked about the taste of the grass in the fynbos, and how delicious it was before the baboons took over. The baboon mama was the worst, and used to eat flowers. The fields were once filled with yellow flowers, bright and blossoming like suns. When the baboons came, the zebras watched with dismay as the flowers departed one by one. The baby baboons ate flowers too, and soon the fynbos dotted with little suns became and ordinary landscape with scrub and rocks and simple things but not flowers.

And that is why the zebra eats cake.

So I order a cake, thinking that it must taste like sunshine or at least like a yellow flower and the cake arrives and there are no baboons to be seen and no yellow flowers and no fynbos either. The layered cake was vanilla and chocolate with icing in between and the zebra cake was delicious, all sweet and no savory. It would be better warm with a bit of ice cream dolloped on top, maybe vanilla but chocolate would work to. The zebra stares at me and he says, "How can you eat that stuff?"