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It was on a Wednesday when I
woke up early and found monkeys
on my arms, small monkeys
with red, yellow, and white faces, and black eyes
and little furry throats rabid with chatter
and fingers not much thicker and longer
than the individual letters of printed words.

The cashier asked me what was making all
that noise and I said, “Monkeys.”

Her eyes went up and down
and to the left and to the right.
I said “No” and showed her
the little monkeys swinging
from hair to hair on my arm.
“You should do something,” she said,
but not in a surprised way.
I said, “Yes but first I need to do
something about all the noise
they make on my arms and legs.
My children hear me coming and run.”

A neighbor called it a Monkey Swarm.
“It’s a swarm of monkeys,” she said.
“My favorite is that little one
with a yellow mask, the one
that keeps popping its head out
from between your index and middle
fingers.  And then there’s the one
that looks like a gorilla, that one there.”

The doctor said that periodically
it was true: out of a small percent
of the population some people
would suffer a spawning of monkeys,
others a swarm of snakes, yet others
a sudden appearance of cranes
behind the knees and little bickering
blue jays on the shoulders
and that no remedy had yet
to open the doors of pharma
and step out for bottling
other than, he said, a studied
calculation into feeding
and hydration of the outgrowth.

“But keep them happy,” he said,
“as a patient of mine who suffered
alligators tried introducing hippos
into the ecosystem of his skin
and found himself soon after eaten alive.”

“Which is dispiriting,” I said,
“because these monkeys,
especially this one with the white
face, who settles on my elbow
and hoots at passing traffic,
have turned my nights and daily
walks into concerts of calls,
eruptions of vicious monkey shouting,
and sometimes I fear they might
pick up a habit of biting.”

But they never took up
the habit of biting, no, these
little hordes of monkeys
on my hands and legs and arms,
some taking up residence
on my eye lids, weighing them down,
and I learned to live with them,
gave them each an appropriate
name, such as Henry and Charlie,
and hoped that one day,
one day surely soon, with little
help from the doctors or neighbors,
and with proper care of my person,
they would seek some other
land to swarm and swing on,
some other skin to disturb,
these monkeys that simply
appeared on me one day.

my dialogue with Luke was a strange one
somewhat disconcerting.
It was at the coffee shop where he addressed
me with a cup in his hand, a book in the other,
about which, he said, he regretted

what he’d once written and now couldn’t take back
as it’s the nature and weakness of books,
as with photographs, he said,
to make errors permanent
but which? I asked,
and he said:
the thing about the lilies

I asked him about the lilies
I asked him about the nature of analogy
he said that the analogy was an honest
one but that he wanted to change
his mind about the lilies
how they do indeed work
hard, expending energy in their synthesis
he also explained how he had studied
over the verbs toil and spin
and the list he shuffled through in his thinking
not toil or spin but maybe walk, lift, cook,
change the oil, spread mulch,
lay, fret, divulge, lie
but that toil and spin made the final
rendition as he couldn’t make sense of walk
or spread mulch or lie

but I wasn’t, he said, thinking about cloth
or building walls and that, in any event,
he said, I’ve changed my mind but as it is with books
the editors will refuse to reprint my changes
because if the lilies go then what else?

But I’ve altered my thinking, he said, sipping
from the cup and stuffing the little book
in his pocket.  I said, it shouldn’t matter
what the lilies do; they’re doing quite fine
on my little plot.  I said, agreeing, when I do see them
I do indeed see them toiling and spinning,
especially the wasps about them
how I watch their little darting shadows
for hours as they cram for the following suns
and fear the coming of the phoebes for their
paperparcel’d children

Your problem, I said, is that we never
needed you to understand the lilies

and here is now where they stand
with their fruit plates, meats, smiles,
other comforts and casseroles
while behind me and behind them
the world is a disheveled poem

yes here is where they stand
on the door I used to open
the hard matter of the walls
somewhere maybe in Alabama, Texas
carried in tune to the wind and rain

where, in some distance, someone points
and says there’s rain and wind coming
it’s like gray clay in a blender
see it up there
it smells of metal dust

no, a neighbor says, following
all the fingers raised, no, that’s
someone’s walls, bits and pieces of door
frame, windows in crystal grain
and we should run now or someone
down South or out East will make the same
mistake, call that laughing thing above the city
rain or hail but its not a metaphor
or any other sort of exotic figure of speech

it’s really stonehard wads of doll and corn hair,
fragments of mountain, fricasseed newspaper,
the atoms of love letters, and the reason
it’s so dark is because the paints of all those
Northern artists has been mixed
in is freighttrain music and movements
of air crowded with framing nails and hairclips
and buttons and someone’s teeth,
there a pen, there a crutch, there a spoon,
there a bag of peanuts,
there a bag of seeds,
car keys, paint cans,
someone else’s problems, unpaid bills,
bags of trash, senseless arrangements of plants,
coin rolls, trumpets, socks, gerbil cages
nothing about any of this is a metaphor
or trick of the light so no it’s not rain you see,
the neighbor says, who always wants to be right
and who at this moment probably is

he says, we should run now because
that’s not rain on the way, that purple stuff
we’re pointing at
it’s not a metaphor at all

and tomorrow here is where they’ll stand
with their fruit plates, meats, smiles,
other comforts and casseroles
while behind us and behind them
the world will be a disheveled poem