The Naked Ape

I didn’t study Dad in a laboratory setting

it would have been unethical 

– and a feat of surprising precocity – 

since he was a teacher

and I was a cherished blank slate.

He sent me out on an errand once.

I caught the bus to St. Aldate’s

to the neo gothic novelty of the town hall

with its yellow stone book-end 

where the old city library is appended 

to the downhill side and rises 

as a castle in the air, 

an architecture of fancy

half-turreted, high-balconied

rolling its Cinderella steps out to the street

and whispering a promise to small borrowers 

of shelves of fairy tales and medieval bestiaries.

So roughly what I was thinking 

with my memorised title,

was that I would be collecting a book

about a peculiar type of mythical monkey

or a Kipling ape that would scrap and screech

off the page as it suffered again

the origins of its hairless state.

I encountered an ethology instead,

quite the minor Chatterley of its day,

a science of how humans naturally behave.

Inborn bestial urges, earthy motives.

The text was not a particular shock, 

the chapter on sex passed me by.

I was changed by a vicarious lesson;

hard-hit and happy at the sense

of a father who sought out that book.

The naked ape is never satisfied,

is endlessly curious and inventive,

intellectually adventurous and unafraid,

approaches ideas without caution

and never stops investigating.