El dawn de man

I turn around and see behind
an outflowing of countless centuries,
spilling the mouth of history, stretching taut
the paper drawstring stitched around its lips,
oozing to the farthest reaches of
recorded time, where paper frays and frames
the forms of kings, and mounds of plebeian dust
ride the backwards-floating wind of time.

In the primal bush in golden sunshine robed,
perspiring blackened topsoil underneath
to cool the crib, the little feet of lizards
now long returned to loam and dirt would drag
their little bellies through the oozing mud
and scrawl across the land in scurried streaks
a city in relief embossed in dirt,
winding its ways through the swaying tallgrass,

until the primal simian learned that if
he tucked his throbbing thumb against the rock
cupped in his foregathered dactyls, it would
repel the haul of gravity and taste
the glassy higher air unsullied still
by smoke and breath, and fly to where it pleased
him that it fly to hammer muck from meat
and speckle red his ragged face through art of

slaughter. The blood of grassland peasantry
made flush the lining of the arteries
that plotted lines awry about his face,
and on his temple set a bony crown,
and fed the marrows of his kingly bones;
the bulbous mouth, the downy cheeks, the squat
phallus resting in its matted nest, like
the monkey-king upon his fleshly throne.

Of morbid curiosity I chase
with eyes the lives of my progenitor,
and deep within my chest the drum begins
to beat at sight of savagery to match
the savagery forever etched upon
my cardiac wall. What in me is human,
whatever masculine, testosterone
trails afire, descended the lines from him.

But what in me is human had been boiled
and fused together in bubbling womb-water:
the primal male had swum towards the female
and had cocooned himself within her, sharing
blood and spirit to build a progeny, like
the baby hominid that stood just slightly
taller than his hulking parents and shuffled
around the shelter that his mother built him.

His mother reined the fingers fixing slats
in grooves of some austere machinery,
and father let him hold the gutted bow
while seated on the saddled arching hump.
But both father and mother directed
the drawing of the catgut, taught the love
of creaking wood as the curved spine is drawn
taut, and arrow loosed at a mammoth’s heart.

It’s only fitting hence that he be
anointed, forehead, fist, and foot, with blood,
bespeckled scarlet as the ruptured soil
with mammoths’ blood, with blood of wolves and rats
and monkeys born to foreign broods with twisted
snarls affixed upon their snouts, as he claps
a bloody wedding done against a skull

with bloody cudgel blows. He dragged his prize
away, and no ceremony except
the scarlet consecrate upon his head
and taste of red communion on his fangs,
but he fucked her and another brood was born,
bespeckled scarlet as the ruptured soil.
When he died his ravaged widow served him
to a pack of loping hyenas in the night.