The Mandrill

“Something strange happened in me as I stared at the colobus monkeys...”

It’s been a while since I shared a poem, but this one was too weird to tuck in my drawer…

The Mandrill

It was President’s Day, and the trip was cancelled due to inclemency.
Rather than reflect on my lost love
Or on the figures of Mount Rushmore, I went to the Natural History Museum.
There would be other faces there.

It was a relief stepping from the cold deep echoes of the city
Into a chatterbox full of children,
But their joy grew to a frenzy. I stuck in my AirPods,
And they were gone.

When I was a kid, I loved the forms of animals.
I would draw them patiently, one-by-one,
Filling my little red notebook with images from the encyclopedia.
Both books were hard-covered, and both I wore to the bone.
I wasn’t lonely. There were beautiful creatures
Named in lively foreign tongues—pangolin, okapi, orang-utan—
And extinct ones with ancient names like stone—
Deinonychus, Corythosaurus, Quetzalcoatlus.

It comforted me to see these names return.
Their bodily forms awakened my spirit, as if in admiring their shape
I could understand the reason behind their creation
And their death.
Eyeless gulls and terns slashed like sidestrokes of a pointed brush.
Cranes and cormorants and kingfishers,
Perfect in proportion, exquisite in color, stared through glass.
A lone owl hung like a silent machine of war.

But what really got me was the primates:
Alien lemurs with scared eyes,
Chimpanzees with brutal muscles and hands,
Startlingly familiar.
Something strange happened in me as I stared at the colobus monkeys
Convening in the canopy, long wispy hair streaming down
Like the uncut hair of wise men and women from another time. For a second,
I was in their world of water and magic, darting fearfully through treetops, among clouds.

Most impressive of all was the mandrill,
A big male with a flared mane, long face streaked in red and blue.
His fists pressed into the soil, and the chatter of insects rose
As he stood tall like a cruel and disapproving father.
His eyes were like the barrel of a gun.

I tell you now, beautiful, I was there.
I stood with the mandrill in life, face-to-face.
We stared with the fire of lineage burning in our eyes.
Only one of us survived.

✤

---