Monkey Zero, and: A Simple Heart

MONKEY ZERO / Kenneth Rosen Somewhere in central Africa, In Gabon, Cameroon, or Zaire, A monkey jumped down from a tree And bit a native on the finger, Chucking it under the chin, Trying to fling it, furry thing, away, Sucking the nibbled finger, adjusting His sarong, grumbling, walking along, Maybe remembering later its humid AU-iris eyes, its wizened face So sorrowful and inquiring as it Nipped him, a monkey the emblem Of taboo more than snake, more than Sin, of no eating humanoid meat, Of no men loving men, for its hairy Two-leggedness and prehensUe taU, This one's Uving saUva racing in The gym of the black feUow's blood Like Pac-man, making him sick with it, The thirsty disease, at first his Invisible gift, later his death. In Africa they seU you monkey-burger Sandwiches, or you'U see roasted With peanuts and yams, a monkey Trussed Uke a chicken and headless In its iron pan. We eat the meat Of male cows for roastbeef dinner Or In cheeseburgers, drink the milk Of female cows after boiling it clean Per Louis Pasteur, hardly remembering The Missouri Review · 289 It was milk and mother's kisses That infected with tuberculosis Kafka, Keats, the Brontë sisters, Wolfgang Mozart, giving us Van Morrison singing T.B. Sheets. In ancient Greece they took a person Too sick to speak, decked him in flowers And made a parade. After they kiUed him The vUlage settled back into a somber Sort of peace, the way the Aztecs Calmed down for about a week after Liberating with a rock knife the hearts Of captive neighbors at Sunday service, Quetzalcoatl, the yeUow-jammer priest, Holding each aloft Uke a robin. How wUd The moment before, as on the sunny lull To the cross or steps to a guiUotine, How wUd, how deafening the inner And outer roar, and yet we step. This Is memory without history, and this Snake-wave of death and hysteria our Flooded planet's whole saga, the fish Gasping in the net suddenly gutted, The pigeon decapitated by a cat despite A beUyful of gurry—I saw one yesterday In my backyard, black wings fanned and Red neck stump the size of a half doUar— Or cat mashed by a car, flea squashed, Mosquito swatted. The waves recede Leaving many ponds in which we may Love a child or cultivate a flower, MUd cousins of the moment of absolute Truth that is love homosexual, or when A heroin syringe enters the blood for Love, truth, as if a monkey's indsor, 290 · The Missouri Review Kenneth Rosen Monkey Zero. I hold you in my arms, We kiss. The mind is blank, and this WhoUy feral nothingness is human Meaning, and bUss. So, Ut matches And icicles, that vanish alike in a lake, Precious Ufe, precious death, precious sex, AU zero, let us remember the ancient Geometer who told the soldiers with their Upraised swords and breathless horses, "I pray you don't disturb my circles!" Kenneth Rosen The Missouri Review · 292 A SIMPLE HEART / Kenneth Rosen Gustave Flaubert, cornholer of Arabs, Inventor of the doctor's wife who was AU ovary, a doting melancholy dreamer, sow For a student for a fortnight and a day, And a suicide, Madame Emma Bovary— She gobbled arsenic, gentle reader, Slopped it into her mouth Uke Laundry soap, and he, with falling fits and syphUis, the depressed, Elusive lover of an older Parisian Lady who wrote romantic fiction, Uved AU his Ufe in a farmhouse upriver From Rouen with his mother, a surgeon's Widow, as she Uved aU her Ufe With him, dying when her word pig Of a son was fifty-six or -seven, And then he wrote, A Simple Heart, Depicting himself at last, in reckless Self-pity, as a servant girl named FeUdty, an orphan wounded in love By a coarse, cowardly farmhand, Serving a selfish widow fifty years, And attached, at the end of her Ufe, To a parrot which she had stuffed When it died, and in her own deaf SeniUty and dying delirium, Confused with God, the Holy Ghost, Our Father who art in Heaven. Our...