Lions Have All The Answers

Lions have all the answers
but we’re too fearful
to ask them the questions
Ditto, tigers. And possibly pythons.
Pythons and tigers have all the answers, too
bringing us, for our purposes,
to the end of the road in the
Animal Kingdom because nobody
believes answers from the less ferocious
goldfish in his cloudy bowl
duck-billed platypus
pygmy goat Why does
it have to be an animal? Paint
brushes dipped in phthalo blue
watercolor— Those paintbrushes? They
Have All The Answers
Or was it the painted pictures the
painters or the scenes themselves
all those sunsets mountains
crashing waves flowered meadows had
all the answers after the painters
packed up and went home to their dinners
when the landscapes could stop posing
and breathe again back to being dirt
covered in rocks flowers oceans
Each strata with its own answers or Hey
Here’s An Idea—
ask the yellowbark oak at the edge of the frame
thick with full rings of new answers every year
but only one way to see his answers
laid out on view in slices crosswise
and I’m not cutting down an oak tree
just to finish a poem so that’s
out and we’re straight back to lions
because rumor on the savanna is
Lions have all the answers