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Poem Of The Week: Pornography For Pandas By Victoria Gatehouse

Pornography for Pandas

Yang Guang (Sunshine) raises himself
on hind legs, reaches for the carrot, a little higher

building muscle for the two-minute act to come,
his enclosure dim lit, smooth jazz dreamy

daubed with the urine of Tian Tian (Sweetie)
when last in season – all this to get him in the mood

his bodyweight in food each day for stamina
and now, a forty-inch screen, erected

beyond the bars. His daily viewing –
a male pinning a female’s head to the ground

so she can’t bite, using his other paw to hoist
her rear end up. A keeper passes, leers

through the bars – watch and learn, Sunshine.
Yang Guang shifts the dark smudge of his gaze,

slowly strips down another stalk of bamboo.

Victoria Gatehouse’s fine, closely-observed poem describes a necessary act of species propagation, a nod to the endangered panda population whose inability to procreate seems to be a condition of its natural, comic insouciance: to watch a panda roll, tumble and generally arse about is to wonder at its capacity to survive in the wild. Better suited to the stripping and gnawing of bamboo, the Yang Guang of ‘Pornography for Pandas’ is sublimely indifferent to the act of copulation, even in the presence of seductive blandishments – the female urine daubings of his prospective mate Tian Tian and the forty-inch telly yielding a daily ‘diet’ of bestial intercourse.

A surface reading of Gatehouse’s poem might not disclose the kinds of ambiguity that are a characteristic of her poetry, for her slow-moving couplets direct the reader to the tableau in the enclosure. But this process of procreative ‘engineering’ shadows, in the brute detail, and in the suggestive language of abuse – the use of the term ‘porn’, the violence and the ‘leers’ of the zookeeper – the darker potential of all-too human relationships. The heavy coincidence of the panda’s translated name and the keeper’s double-entendre, invest the bear’s otherwise delicious indifference with a whole new landscape of meaning.

‘Pornography for Pandas’ is taken from The Hawthorn Bride, published by Indigo Dreams (2024), and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author.

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