excavation

Quarry for the Hungry Monkeys

Poor families can’t afford to live like Brontosaurus

because old bodies no longer generate fireworks

for monkeys. Sepulchered in the stomach’s sad

hollow, butchered remains of peasants are winnowed,

divided among luckier apes who cannot digest

the poverty of dinosaurs. Those creatures have

no memories of primates perched gluttonous

at their desks—that movie with Ronald Reagan

as the father of all chimpanzees, Marie Antoinette as

that princess who bobbles on about dessert before losing

her head. Each morning, the gibbons feast on foreclosed

homes, on faded polaroids of theropod scraps jettisoned

in the swamp. Under the cloche of night, here is a jawful

of coffee-stained teeth and hoary mugwort. Here is desire,

shaped like that simian taste for Triceratops and primate

skullduggery. Here is Charlton Heston’s America—allegory

disguised thin as an astronaut unboxed and duped

into discovering his landlady buried in the strata.

Here is George W’s America—a fortune for monkeys

greedy for meat as General Motors lays off enough

livestock to fire up indigestion in the fattest

orangutans. Perhaps spear gashes in prehistoric bone

shall not still the mouths of long-vanished sauropods,

tinny voices from the Jurassic sparking a plot against

apes looking for supper. That dithery brain recalls

eating giant ferns, dreading thatchy predators who stalk

with expensive thumbs. That leathery body remembers

living on the skids without worry about last paychecks,

but here is a family portrait, a smorgasbord for gorilla

billionaires—here is a mother worried about her mortgage,

father about social security, junior about extinction.