I N   T H E  
A M E R I C A N   M U S E U M   O F   N A T U R A L   H I S T O R Y
N e w   Y o r k   C i t y
2 0 1 4 

THE HALL OF PRIMATES


There is a circuit here
From lower evolution to higher
Stay to the right and revolve
Counterclockwise
A puzzling course
As you never should wind a clock backwards
But this revolution
Still ends with
Man
 
First Case: the lemurs
Long bushy tails and graspy digits
Ready to pounce on a governor’s plum     
But never on us
Territory doesn’t include taking by force
Unless that grove of monkey fruit trees counts

Second Case: Tarsiers
Here’s a Tarsius bancanus          
Ascending a branch
His 12 ounce heft and devil face
Impersonate (right word?) a troll or goblin
If you had a mean streak, you could fly to Borneo        
And sneak a dozen back in a dog box
And let them loose in nephew’s room before bedtime
“What? There are no such things as elves. Now get to bed!”
 

THE HALL OF HUMAN ORIGINS


From the Great Ape descended chimp and Man
Sharing 99% DNA
Although we don’t sit down together on holidays


THE FIRST HUMANS


The guide says “We didn’t come down from the trees; the trees came down from us.”
So, we rose on our haunches and roamed the savannah
Maybe Eden was the forest
And The Fall was the thrust out

From there Homo ergaster was on the move
Walking out of Africa for new territory
(Remember the lemur and its fruit trees?)
Looking for Eden again       

Two hand-holding Australopithecines flee streams of hissing pumice
Unflappable tourists compare their footprints to ones left by that couple,
Probably wondering whether they too would have fled only from harm
Or Kenya itself

Later, when white-hot fear cooled to red-hot
Neanderthal cared for his sick and buried the dead.   
Notwithstanding a peculiar taste for human flesh,
We were on our way to the civilized.

There’s a Cro-Magnon hut out of woolly mammoth bones         
While not giving up on stewing his neighbors
He felt some urge, some Eros, inflecting him toward    
Less anti-social practices
And so he created…
Art

75,000 year old carvings from South Africa       
Make Lascaux look like a young upstart

See those spear-throwers there made of antler?  

It’s a vicious circle of food but not of art
As for that: animal-painted caves
Like Solutrean Sistene Chapels
Bless the kill or maybe do…something…more       
Meat only fills the belly, but incarnations in pigment
Speak of another place, and maybe… of hope

Keep going
“A World of Expression” presents film of Benny Goodman on clarinet
Against a Sikh flutist – a Battle of the Bands      
Egos clashing but not art


MAN RISES TO CIVILIZATION


a)  The Ice Age

We begin with Peking Man – some rehashing from before
(Remember the woolly mammoth Quonset hut?)       
Here a Neanderthal child’s body lies buried under goat horns,
Goat’s spirit protecting him in the next world perhaps   
But in this one Man had to chip and chip at flint      
(The artistry and craft of those spearheads)
To pierce the deer or aurax [or more dangerous game]
The ice can cover a multitude of sins

b)  After the Ice Age

But when it cracked and popped and melted off,
Man couldn’t blame the ice any more
And used that large brain to farm the now uncovered earth
And tame the animals that once had mystified him on the cave walls (the first museums)
He put them to the yoke and plow
To tame that wildness

At Çatal Hüyük, Turkey (6,500 B.C.) the first true houses
That model shows the hearth and sofas
But not the bones of family members -
Picked clean by vultures and inserted
Into the dried mud of those benches -
No greater mementos than these,     
In the first haunted houses

The village, the plow, the collectivized human energy 
(The true hallmark of civilization)
This case holds a female with grandiose breasts in clay
Not for enticing men
But as talismans warding off the drought and locusts
Their store of milk against the lean times

c) The Age of Bronze

As your village might come toe-to-toe with another village,
Your spears had to fly longer
So stone gave way to bronze
And now the sword coexisted with the plowshare
See the blades there behind the glass
Lest some teenager lift them and start some trouble
Between the Hudson and East [rather than Tigris and Euphrates]?

However, case 7 protects a Neolithic settlement      
Where the Swiss Lake Dwellers are living in pre-chalets
Impressing and pinching pottery instead of flesh
And minding their neutrality

Then came the Ubaids:
Rational towns built around stepped temples
Priests managed the towns’ eternal drives
That collective id driven to sacrifices
While merchants, smiths, and traders bartered for worldly needs      
All was in balance

Out to the Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda,
Whose mural honors the eponymous president and his Nobel Peace Prize
For ending the Russo-Japanese War
While below an Allosaurus attacks a Barosaurus
And two boys wrestle by Reproductions

Some brute scratched his name into the plinth of the 
Military statue         
Its carvings already wearing with time    

Past the monumental columns,
Their bases animal-carved 
We descend by steps and go up the avenue
Its collective energy an impression
Cars accelerating like projectiles

We continue on despite the urge to stay
With the great apartment buildings and their terraced gardens    
Stretching upwards
And the plain of Central Park across…