Gray-handed Night Monkeys

Photo credit: ©Lida Trujillo/iNaturalist/Creative Commons.

Bogotazo

. . . dubbed Aotus griseimembr by Dan G. Elliot in 1912, nocturnal,

smaller than kittycats and monogamous, raising

their kits together: he the carrying,

the lactation she—naturally;

it must be

thirty million years ago or so that these critters' ancestors

were swept here—flotsam from the sea,

with opposable thumbs (like you and me);

then, around 1499, a big, fiercer upright ape came floating in,

whose descendants farm Andean forests today, cultivating coca for El Norte's discreet discerning noses.

These "owl monkeys" are threatened and vulnerable. You can buy their babies in pet stores,

some plucked from their mothers' backs as young as three days' old.

It's legal to own a monkey in Virginia, and in most of the red half of these disunited states.

They sometimes live to be twenty!

Post-Liberation Litotes

"His politics was not that of a timid old gentleman appalled by the idea of shunning litotes."—Albert Cohen

I thought it Liberal to be clever.

My contribution's lost forever.

I wasn't wrong to make no fuss,

But in the upshot missed the bus.

A figure in unwritten history.

Oh, well, the joke's, Who shouldn't be!?

Tit for tat's not my cup of tea,

For murder's move's disputable.

Flotsam and jetsam can't agree

Though the verdict's irrefutable.

Fucked, the virtuous terrorist,

Finessed along corruption's piste,

Brave enough—but wrong, you see!

Epigraph: Albert Cohen, "Churchill d'Angleterre" (1943): « Sa politique n'est pas celle d'un vieux monsieur timide, épouvanté à l'idée de ne pas faire de litotes. »

Litotes: "A [rhetorical] figure in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of the contrary . . . e.g., a citizen of no mean city" (OED, sv). From Greek λιτότης, "frugality" or "simplicity." Pronunciation in English as "lai -tow-tees" is an error—German correctly renders both the i and e in "litotes" like the i in German ist (or English "is"), and Modern Greek pronounces the ι and η in λιτότης that way too.

Apophasis with White Rabbit

You must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”—Richard Feynman

Remember! Souviens-toi! prodigue! Esto memor!—Baudelaire, "The Clock"

Unthinking spendthrift, we don't roam,

Or aspire to, a Bel Air earth—

Like the fox hunters whose venery

Prolongs this manufactured dearth!

Banished from the present scenery,

Country's grate and fame’s disgrace,

Can't harm a lyrical refrain—

Phone has gleanèd my teeming brain!

Doubtful traveler ("It's all bunk!")

With lots to learn, these long drinks drunk,

Dumbly dissing what once we bought

So soulfully, if sense untaught,

The jewels of ancestral habit,

Quit running down that Dead White rabbit!

Apophasis: "A [rhetorical] figure in which we feign to deny or pass over what we really say or advise" (OED, sv). What politicians do for a living.

Tip o’ the phone to John Keats' “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be.”