The Birds and the Bees
- The Birds and the Bees
Shells have been foundwith holes, sparkly pigments indicatingNeanderthals used to wear makeup. I don'tlike my wife to wear anybut makeup in this momenthas serious meaning.A painted Neanderthal faceis our first proof a Neanderthal is capableof symbolic thinking, meaningwhen a Neanderthal rubbed two synapses together,she could have seen God or gods or some mythosto explain why she was there at all; the same questionthe Japanese in Tokyo ask, not about themselves,but the transient crows that come to the cityto eat trash, scare kids, and steal rice.The saving grace is the bee farmson the roofs of buildings wherewhen bees see a beak's black sparkle,they think they see a bear, sendingangry bees in that direction;to not anger my wife, I compliment herwhen she's wearing makeup,and now when she wears it I thinknon-symbolic thought,wanting to light a fireunder her, to get her hot enoughto take me to bed. Latelythe best aphrodisiac is talk of a kid,like the one diagrammed on page 57 ofthe pregnancy book, whose arms and legsare fully extended, appearing to pushon the uterus wall. I say "appearing"because I wonder about symbolic languagein the womb. To me it looks likethe baby is painting on all [End Page 13] the walls with his two hands, two feet,and I think this might be proofthat on the wombs of mothers a babyleaves petroglyphs, all our motherswalking around with our secret,pre-natal ideas, not knowing that inside,their babies have been in the throesof symbolic thought, those moist wallslike rock telling the story of earlyhumanity, a story we all want toknow, but one forgottenas soon as we are able to speak,which seems reason enough to wantto have a kid, to speak to a littleNeanderthal in the cave of its mother. [End Page 14]
Timothy Kercher now lives in Kiev, Ukraine, after living in the Republic of Georgia for the past four years, where he has been editing and translating an anthology of contemporary Georgian poetry. Originally from Colorado, he teaches high school English and is working in his fifth country overseas — Mongolia, Mexico, and Bosnia being the others. His manuscript, "Nobody's Odyssey," was recently selected as a finalist for the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry. His poems and translations have appeared recently or are forthcoming in a number of literary publications, including the Atlanta Review, The Dirty Goat, Guernica, Poetry International Journal, Barnyard Poetry Magazine, Los Angeles Review, Willow Review, and others.
