Golden Angels
(from All About Angels)
They stand beneath guardian trees
their saffron garments glossed with gold.
Hands cupped, bodies bent,
they softly swell as they dip
beneath the rain.
They speak to me:
wild prophets from an ancestral book
that I believed in when I was a child,
but no longer understand.
I try to read the aroma of their lips,
their slow, small growth of gesture.
Their wings are traps
tripping my tongue
preventing me from flight.
Monkey Turns Down Promotion
“I hereby appoint you head of the asylum.”
The young office monkey with the plastic stethoscope
was dressed neatly in a white sheet.
“Dr. Freud, I presume?” Monkey held out his hand
but his witticism was lost in a flood of water
flowing from the flush and over the floor.
Monkey stood there, paddling in piddle.
Inmates with crowded heads and vacant faces,
fools grinning at a universe of folly, paddled beside him.
He wiped a sick one’s drool from his sleeve.
The office boy spat on his hands,
slicked down his hair, and placed his stethoscope
on monkey’s heaving chest.
“You have no pulse.”
“How do you know I have no pulse?
Surely, you cannot hear my heart
for you have a banana stuck in your ear.”
“Speak up!” said the office boy, “I cannot hear you:
I have a banana stuck in my ear.”
Then monkey felt fear.
Daylight diminished and waters closed over his head.
He spurned the proffered paw,
the life belt thrown by the offer of a new position.
Exit monkey left, pursued by a chorus:
“Run, monkey, run!”
Monkey Teaches Sunday School on Mondays
(With apologies to Pavlov and his dogs)
Younger monkeys e-mail elder monkey
and expect an answer within two minutes.
Elder monkey drools and writes right back.
He is turned on by the bells and
whistles of his computer.
“Woof! Woof!”
His handlers hand him a biscuit.
Elder monkey has grown to appreciate
tension and abuse:
the systematic beatings,
the shit and foul words hurled at his head.
The working conditions are overcrowded.
Elder monkey is overworked.
Yet he has managed to survive,
to stay alive and fight
what he once believed was the good fight.
Now he no longer knows:
nor does he drool anymore
when bells and whistles sound
and his handlers bait him with
an occasional, half-price biscuit.
In Absentia 3
Questions
I hear her voice, delicate, distant.
I run to the sound, jump on the table
in my usual spot by her play thing,
but she isn’t there. He’s there, damn it,
talking away. I can see him, smell him,
I hate him, his other sex perfumes,
but there he is and when he stops talking,
I can hear her voice. I move to his play
thing. A shadow, I can’t make it out,
then her voice again, my whiskers stiffen,
I lean forward and sniff, but no smell,
she has no smell, and scentless, I cannot
sense her, I bristle and she calls me, calls
me by my favorite names, and mews, I mew,
but I can’t smell her, and there’s no sense
of touch … is this the hell all pussy cats
will suffer … shadows on a screen, a haunting
voice, memories shifting and dancing,
no touch, no hugs, no sense of smell …
and nothing solid … just shadows and absence?
Monkey Temple
The monkeys appear, as if by magic.
They tumble out of windows and doorways.
They clamber through the holes in the temple’s ruined roof.
They are quiet at first.
They inspect their surroundings.
They ogle the crowd gathering for the afternoon show.
They watch the watchers watching them.
They pulsate, for no reason at all, they pulsate, then ululate,
They jump up and down and swing from the temple’s roof.
They pontificate, gesticulate, and regurgitate.
They sit and sift for fleas. They defecate and urinate.
They masticate cautiously. They castigate and fornicate.
They ruminate. They masturbate. They rush to the top of the temple
and on the uplifted faces of the crowd they ejaculate.
In Absentia
2
At the Airport
It’s dark when we leave the car in the car park.
You unload your suitcase and wheel it away.
Dawn dawdles and you’ll see its very first spark,
high in the sky, like turkey vultures who play
with fire from old gods and return to earth,
wings aflame. People no longer kneel and pray
for fair winds and fine weather. There is a dearth
of hands conjoined in prayer. Fingers clasp books, lap
-tops, scans, photo IDs, seat choice, proof of birth …
nobody smiles, nobody laughs. It’s a crap
-shoot, really, each flight, dice rolling as to who
sits next to who(m). Can anyone tell which chap
will pull out a knife or gun and threaten to
kill someone if rough orders are disobeyed.
It wasn’t like this before: jungle law, zoo
-keepers needed to keep order, guns displayed
by security guards who look grim and show
their teeth, gritting them tight as if on parade,
as if they wanted someone to help them grade
each passenger, each situation, dogs low
-slung sniff at you when you board, and you afraid
your fear will show. Come back my love. Don’t go.
Monkey’s Tractatus
(after a philosophical argument between
Ludvig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell)
When monkey sees a hippopotamus in the temple grounds
he knows it is grounded in fact.
We really must get rid of it!
It obediently vanishes.
There is a silence in the temple cells
broken only by the broom’s clean sweep
as insects are swept away from the footsteps of the unworthy.
Monkey sees the hippo trapped beneath a chair.
He can feel it struggling to set itself free.
Now hippo gets tangled in monkey’s hair.
Monkey will have its hide for a shield against dark thoughts,
an unbroken umbrella to guard him from this rain of teardrops.
Hippo bathes in a hip bath of crocodile tears:
Sunt rerum lacrimae.
He wallows in philosophical sorrow.
When the hippo leaves the temple,
there is a silence as the unspoken word returns,
a silence broken only by the hum of the hoover,
and the beat of a condor’s invisible wings.
In absentia
Prelude
1
The Beaver Pond
Tomorrow, early, my love, you’ll fly away.
Today, you’ll walk round the Beaver Pond
where red and yellow leaves abound. A thin grey
webbing garlands one dead tree. I’m not too fond
of tent worms. I hate them when they swing
from low branches. Give me a fresh green frond
caught by the morning sun in early spring
or else bright autumn leaves so soon to fall.
I love American Goldfinches when they sing
that last departing song. I love most of all
those occasional visitors: do you recall that bright
blue Indigo Bunting with his “I’m-a-lost-bird call?”
The hunting hawks give everyone a fright.
They perch on top of a garden tree
then step off into space to claw-first alight
on some poor songbird trilling away, quite free
from fear, his unfinished symphony of song.
It’s getting late, my love. You walk towards me
out of the woods. I’ll end this poem with a plea:
don’t forget me … and don’t stay away too long.
Monkey Chews the Cud
(after Octavio Paz, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Stéphane Mallarmé)
Brilliant in his rising, a new sun shines on monkey’s world,
dispersing darkness, fragmenting it into shadows.
Sunshine and shadow: heads and tails of an age old
combination sealed back-to-back on the self-same coin.
¿Cara o cruz? Heads or tails? Sunshine or shadow?
Solombra, perhaps? Or is it just the act of perception,
as Wittgenstein would have us believe, and nothing more:
the metal always spinning on its milled edge, never falling,
the coin on its axis, a new day with its potential,
sunshine or shadow, thrown dice still skittering,
a new world imperceptibly poised in its own making?
Monkey scratches his head. Such enormous depths
are not for him to plumb, this early in the morning.
Better by far the banana peeled, the fresh skin thrown
away for someone else to slip on, and monkey
sitting there in silence, chewing his morning cud.
Existentialist Monkey
(after Albert Camus and his Myth of Sisyphus)
Monkey watches Budgie tinkle the small bell hanging below
the yellow plastic mirror in which Budgie gazes in fascination
at his own reflection, nuzzling and nipping himself with his beak.
Black and white soccer balls cover the floor:
“Budgies for the Cup!”
A crimson ladder has another bell on top.
Budgie squeezes a soccer ball between beak and claws,
ascends this ladder, and pushes the ball upwards.
When he gets to the top, the ball slips slowly down.
It falls to the sandpaper floor.
Budgie descends the ladder,
takes a new grip on his soccer ball,
and steadily climbs the rungs.
Budgie is clever: he can imitate the telephone, the doorbell,
the pop of a champagne cork shooting from the bottle, the cat, the dog …
When Budgie whistles, the stupid dog leaps to his feet
and rushes, barking, to the door …
Budgie is two thirds up the ladder now. He pauses for a rest,
stretches his wings, and looks at himself in the mirror.
“There’s a pretty boy!”
“Il faut imaginer Budgie heureux.”
rogermoorepoet 