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amolosh

Updated: 6 days ago

At Gorillaspoort in the Great Karoo

I one day watched a monkey on a chain

climb up a pole to the little kennel

in an old Boer’s backyard, in which it lived.

The sun beat upon a solitary pepper tree,

from which an evaporation cool box hung.


There never could have been gorillas

there, within a thousand miles, at any rate,

so why then had they called it “Gorilla Gate”?

Carthaginian Hanno saw some on the Gabon coast—or perhaps Mount Cameroon—

two and a half thousand years ago.


The natives taught him their word for these:

Γόριλλαι (gorillai), preserved for us in Greek.*

The Carthaginians naturally couldn't speak

to them or capture any of the mighty males,

but the Punic sailors killed three females,

whose skins were taken back to Carthage, where they lay in a temple museum—at best

until, centuries later, the Romans burned it down: Carthago delenda est!

 

At Gorillaspoort, the monkey shook its chain.

(What was I doing there? Just on a ride.)

How near the forehead to the wrinkled brain!

How close to thinking the close-fitting hide

that shelters it, though neither long abide.

We’ve all of us some kind of skin outside.

How like to difference the everlasting same.

How comparable a feeling to a pain.


So why, then, did they call it Gorilla Gate?

No one could say, or even thought it odd.

No monkey there would ever meet a mate—

no more did I, at that distant date.

“Doggone it!” politely means “Goddamn!”

One (maybe?) does the best one can.


No one can say what makes a poem good.

No one would tell me—especially if they could.

The Qu’ran denies it's poetry—it’s more than that:

The Word of God, delivered by His deed.

Yet it’s poetic, it appears, in Arabic

—which I, confounded ape, can't read.


What gates have to do with gorillas I don't know. / Evolution must have made it so. /

Even viruses and bacteria apparently have social lives. / Our world's a singularity. It thrives.



*Carthaginian troops, mercenaries who spoke many different languages, were commonly commanded in koinē Greek, the elite lingua franca of that era.



February 10, 2025

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amolosh

Updated: Feb 10

In memoriam Michael von Lilienstein Tapscott

 

"Holy Moly!" exclaimed the DC

Comics hero Captain Marvel.

At which, in our Upper Montague

Street flat in Marylebone in 1963,

we laughed—Marijke, I, and you,

Michael—with joy at the foolery

of our—was it bygone?—youth.


“At its root it was was black,

but its flower was as white as milk: /

Moly is what the gods call it:

it’s hard for mortal men /

to dig up; but the gods can do what-

ever they’ve a mind to,” Homer says.*


It was only in 394 CE, I think, when Theodosius closed the temples

—although Athena's great statue

stood in the Parthenon bereft

another century†—that those

old gods may have ceased to be.

Or are they with us yet?

SHAZAM! Just in another guise?

 

*Odyssey 10: 304-6, translated by Peter Green (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), p. 162. Italics added.

†Until 487 CE.


Monday, February 10, 2025

amolosh

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Smyrne Bornabat. 1873. Oil on paper, 15 x 21 cm (5.9 x 8.2 in). Private collection.



“What good's an art, said Corot, who whistled continually while he painted, what good's an art that doesn't make you happy?"

—Alexandre Dumas fils, “Letter to His Father"*



"Corot painted three thousand canvases. Ten thousand of them were sold in America,"

a curator at the Louvre quipped.

"I have only one goal in life: to make landscapes," Corot said.

He begged his mother for permission to dine out every other Friday.

Hopping on one foot, or two, and contented with his luck, he sang bits of opera and whistled while he worked.


Like Corot with his paysages

so I am with my poetry.

As happy artists, we, too, chérie,

could be buried in Père Lachaise along with Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Chopin, Edith Piaf, and many another celebrity.

Fans from all over the world visiting our graves might shed a furtive tear!

Sound like a plan?

No, seriously!


Michel-Léonard Béguine, Camille Corot (1899). Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris
Michel-Léonard Béguine, Camille Corot (1899). Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris

*“Qu’est-ce que c’est qu’un art, disait Corot qui sifflotait sans cesse en peignant, qu’est-ce que c’est qu’un art qui ne rend pas gai?”--Alexandre Dumas fils, “Lettre à son père.”



Sunday, February 6, 2025


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