A few years after Nixon forged the deal with China
that brought Ling Ling and Hsing-Hsing to Washington,
in the period of our history known as Panda Diplomacy,
I was assigned to represent the San Francisco Zoo,
which had recently built a natural habitat
for Western Lowland Gorillas.
The mayor at the time, anxious to approach the Chinese
with the idea of trading a few of our apes
for some of their pandas,
asked me to craft a Great Ape-Panda Exchange Agreement
for which, as you might imagine, there was no template.
So I drove to the intersection of Sloat Boulevard
and the Great Highway to check out the currency.
Particularly Bwanda, the patriarch, born in the rain forests
of Cameroon, black and shiny as the hood of a Mercedes,
except for a silver swath on his back and a russet crown.
He had a taste for grass, and slept at the foot
of an obeche tree, his family on the branches above.
One of his daughters, Koko, became world-famous
for learning a thousand English words in sign language,
then asking for two kittens at Christmas,
whom she named Lipstick and Smokey. But that was later.
Although the mayor envisioned twin 747s landing
simultaneously at SFO and Shanghai International,
my draft of the agreement called for a Cold War-style swap
across a bridge on an unnamed volcanic atoll in the Pacific,
as if the exchangees were decorated military brass.
The mayor met me with a look that said you are not my friend,
so I spoke of the indignity of trading our nearest relatives
for pea-brained fur balls the world had fallen in love with
because they resembled a six-year-old’s stuffed pillow.
I was removed from the project.
                            In the dream, I walk Bwanda and three of his kin
to the midpoint of the bridge, where we meet the pandas.
The alpha panda growls and Bwanda pretends to be impressed,
nods to the mammalian king of a different continent,
rises, and roars. The bridge rattles.
He moves on, turning back briefly with deep set eyes
from a day ten million years ago
when his forbears and ours went their separate ways.