Electra Movie Camera image by Joe Haput CC BY-SA
Neanderthalic Antics: Cantos I-III
by Cosmic Poet Simon Pole
Do not trifle with stars or souls, he said,
My colleague of that research institute,
Our home for decades plus, since our ascent
Out of college to scientific heights,
Recruitment by rich states, with salaries,
And perks, and prestige seeming without end
Until, yes until the great cleavage came
(He and I, state versus state, and past
Opposing the very present we served).
I’m holed up now in this humbled bastion,
Where once we worked and had many glories,
And much good times, and many a glass raised
(The last so richly quaffed on that damn day
Of our collective breakthrough—what a ruse!
Such subterfuge! And the fame which followed,
How bittersweet in this declining time),
And now not even the flattest water
Can I squeeze upon my tongue, or my bones,
In their futile ache heave upon a bed.
On the floor, deflated, I tell you more.
The alert, with red lights, rang trumpet-like
The halls over, and elated, enthused,
We infused the narrow room, with its heat,
Its steel panel, antiseptically clean,
And its chained specimen on the table.
Our colleague Herman, thin and crazy-eyed,
His needle had just insert, and then screamed
The watching near-machines, their bright graphs
And lit numbers into chaos surging,
Like monitors of earth-wide earthquake,
And we who watched tight-ranked, knew the import,
Not ill-judged, not hasty our summons here,
For up sat, up sat upon, the steel slab,
What was once only an apparition
In our minds, an imagined construction
In museum or safari theme park,
Or in baroque bookish speculation,
For here sat up, firm-muscled and breathing,
The Neanderthal male, who from bloat brows
Us watched with something like intelligence.
A horde there was apportioned many rooms
Not long after, when his cousins were raised,
A haul out of thawing ground extracted,
But strange, we found no inserted grave goods,
Or shrouds, or arranged art, only bare dirt,
A haphazard site which harboured the dead,
And no tomb, no primitive sepulchre
Could we discern, and concluded, shrewdly,
With whispers, a fissure perhaps, a hole
Where masses fell down in some disaster,
As dinosaurs, as boned fish are buried,
And pressed, preserved for other days to find,
For other days the absence of culture
To know, for now the fulfilment of wants,
The throwing in of haunches of raw meat
To the rooms, the testing, introduction
Of rock, of stick, of hide and flint and grass,
And always, at the window, obsessive,
A voyeur, a font of drool, was Herman,
With his leering glasses and scribbled notes.