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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