A spider monkey on a chain is meant to be a pleasant sight, and the poem's quiet achievement is to make that pleasure curdle. The setting is a hotel terrace, and the subheading "Hotel Agua Azul" ("blue water" in Spanish) hangs a cool, scenic name over a very dry scene. The title places everything in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, and speaks of "notes" on an "economy of scale." Judging by the poem itself, that economy is a small, petty one, in which a living animal is part of the hotel's furnishings, there "for the diversion" of guests. The central idea is that captivity does not stay politely in the cage. The visitor who pities the monkey, feeds him and enjoys him ends up literally held by him.
The opening sentence sets this up through its grammar. "Held captive" is a dangling phrase that runs through two lines before it finds its subject, the monkey. Until then the phrase could just as well describe the "furtive couples on weekend flings," and the poem lets that doubt linger. Sound reinforces it. Flings, swings, clings, springs, slings, brings, things, stings: the "-ing" chime recurs through the poem, never in a tidy rhyme scheme but always coming back, like the swinging it describes. "Flings" and "swings" are the first pair, which quietly joins the guests' secret pleasures to the animal's compulsive motion. Both are ways of passing time. The last word of the poem is the last of the chime, and "stings" lands with a small, sharp click.
The verse is free, with lines of uneven length and enjambment that tips you over the edge of a line: "hidden / gears & springs," "going through / your things." The ampersands, used in place of "and," make the voice brisk and slightly mechanical, which suits the central image. The monkey swinging for hours seems "driven by hidden gears & springs," a "pendulum." He looks like a clockwork toy, an attraction that runs by itself. Then comes the poem's first turn: "draw a chair / within range & the pendulum stops." Attention switches him off the routine. The guest sitting down in the chair has become an audience, and the monkey, who was never a machine, goes to work on that audience.
From here the poem swings into the second person. "You think, / searching your pockets, going through / your things." The line "Whatever brings relief / to a life of boredom" is wonderfully ambiguous. It is meant as sympathy for the monkey, but it could just as easily describe the hotel guests, who are also bored and also looking for relief. The monkey "importuning / food, trinkets" mirrors the tourist trade, with its small transactions of coins and souvenirs. "Importuning" is a stiff, formal word for begging, and it also carries a faint echo of solicitation, which fits the hotel's atmosphere of furtive couples. This is an inference rather than a statement, but the word choice invites it.
The ending is where the poem sharpens. "How friendly he seems–until" is the hinge. The dash cuts off the speaker's complacency, and the next lines turn physical: "the strength of his grip," "he enrings your leg." The verb "enrings" is unusual, and it wraps the leg the way a shackle or a chain link would. The captive who dangles from a chain has put a chain on someone else. The scale of the rescue is comic, since it takes "half the hotel staff" to pry him loose, and the deadpan tone refuses to turn it into melodrama. The final detail is the most telling: "days later / the spot where he bit still stings." The injury lingers just as guilt lingers, and the poem never says that the stinging is only physical.
The poem is significant because it avoids the two easy attitudes toward a caged animal, sentimental pity and amused indifference. It gives the animal strength, appetite and a kind of anger, then leaves the visitor with a mark that won't fade. In a few lines of dry, exact description it shows how comfortable holiday encounters conceal a relationship of power, and how that relationship can bite back.