The Last of the Purple Tigers

To Reeve Lindbergh

She lived in deepest India,
     Beside the River J.
The most convenient airport was
     Twelve hundred miles away.
To reach her, we would have to rent
     Four camels in Bombay,

Then ride ahead to Bangalore
     And rent a large raccoon,
A bear, a boar, two buffalos,
     A blue-and-white balloon.
(We left on January first
     And got there late in June.)

We didn’t want to capture her:
     We wanted just to look.
We’d read the buzz about her in
     The Total Tiger Book.
(We brought four crates of gumdrops so
     We wouldn’t need to cook.)

We knew she was the last one left
     Of all the purple kind —
The very rarest animal
     That you could ever find.
Just three men had set eyes on her
     (And two of them were blind).

But let me introduce our team:
     First, Mr. Milton Muggs.
He’d made a fortune selling fish
     And oriental rugs
But was best known for his exhaustive
     Catalogue of bugs.

Professor Mantovanity
     Came second, straight from Rome:
Courageous, handsome, passionate,
     And shorter than a gnome.
He always combed his ears, because
     He had no hair to comb.

Third was the great photographer
     Aurelian Q. Zinc,
Who’d filmed a thousand creatures, from
     The mantis to the mink,
Developing each photo as
     He tap-danced in the sink.

And last of all, though not the least
     (Okay... I’ll take a bow),
Was me: Gerard the Talking Chimp,
     The Toast of Old Macao.
(You didn’t think this poem was by
     A monkey — did you now?)

One night we reached the River J
     (Much later than we’d planned).
The four of us, with bated breath,
     Walked forward, hand in hand.
An orange hippopotamus
     Lay sleeping in the sand.

We saw a herd of crimson deer,
     A turquoise porcupine,
Some lavender rhinoceroses —
     Maybe eight or nine —,
A pair of sky-blue cobras coiled
     Beneath a sky-blue vine,

Two dozen golden mongooses
     (Or should I say "mongeese"?),
And thirty-seven pearl-gray lambs
     With lemon-yellow fleece
(Two-thirds of them were skinny and
     The other third obese).

The moon was full, its silver lips
     Were rounded in an O,
As if amazed by everything
     It witnessed down below.
We walked straight forward, single file,
     As fast as we could go.

And there she was: so suddenly
     That none of us dared speak,
Her long, soft, black-striped purple fur
     So beautiful, so chic,
That our four hearts were in our mouths
     And our eight knees were weak.

We stopped. We stared. We stammered out
     "Hello" a dozen ways.
My tongue felt limp as liverwurst.
     My mind was in a daze,
As if it were a slice of bread
     Spread thick with mayonnaise.

"Oh Tiger, Tiger dear," I said,
     "Dear Tiger, burning bright"
(The words were from my favorite poem),
     "It is with much delight
That we at last have found you in
     The forests of the night."

She raised a purple eyebrow. Then
     Her tail began to stir.
That rumbling, grumbling noise — was it
     A growl or a purr?
Would it be best to take our leave
     Or stay just where we were?

All four of us were very scared,
     But I was scared the most.
My hairs together stood up stiff
     As if they’d seen a ghost.
My mind lay flat before me like
     A piece of buttered toast.