Category: The Tiger & Monkey Poems

Talon precise through sand,
gliding a path distinct from volition
or editorial instinct, tracing suggestions
of tail and thick-furred mane
and the deepness of eyes gazing from across
ten millions years of divergence. Around
him the singsong bamboo forests’ incantations
fail to enchant or distract him away from
the task, this feline calligraphy
that amounts to less than art, but much more than
a mere pastime, calculations on the back
of envelopes, kitchen philosophers’ theories.
Through sand, talon sweeps in smooth lines,
inscribing the creature
into the ground, yet never enough for him
to see more than the mere idea of her;
never her face staring back, never actual.

— Gord Sellar, April 2004

Monkeys can go nearly anywhere they please.
Tiger would sit across from her, listening,
head resting upon his great dubious paws
as Monkey told him of the mad things she’d seen
this time, during her frolics in the city.
The mischief flickering in her eyes, the flick
of her tail, the ruffle of her fingers midsentence,
showing him, “It was as wide as this!”

One day, with immense slowness, he decided that
he, as deservedly as she, should see the city.
They tromped through a village jammed blood-full of bumpkins
side-by-side, their strides somehow happily matched.
The villagers’ eyes were too obvious, their terror barely
overpowered by horror at such an unholy pairing.
Tiger met Monkey’s gaze, read carefully, finally asked:
of course, she noticed, she said. But she didn’t care.

— Gord Sellar, April 2004

Tiger’s first best meal is to take the hot guts
of a slaughtered pig stolen from a nearby village
and slash them to shreds, stirring them into the blood
of the hog, to make himself a vicious, fine soup
such as the Eldest Tigers eat when past middle-age,
when they smoke and discuss the madness of the present,
sipping ridiculously foul and pungent liquors.

Monkey sits watching as his huge orange paws wrangle
the chopsticks, and she smiles, unfraid to grin as he lets out
from a single talon finger a claw so long it could slay a man,
yet used only to skewer a precise bit of meat and pop it
into his mouth; then she turns back to her own meal.

– Gord Sellar, April 2004

One day Monkey was called before the Monkey Council.
She was to prove the the prehensility of her tail,
her cleverest organ by far. She smoothed down
the sleek black fur of her body, and then picked
away her doubts like fleas from the forest of her scalp—
biting down hard on each one to extinguish its wriggle.

Wearing a brutally-fanged smile, she swung straight down
into the grove where the Monkey Council sat waiting.
Monkey-question after monkey-question they asked,
and all the while, the ballet of her tail astonished
those among the Council fortunate enough to have been
born imbued with something one might call a “soul”.
She restarted the heart of Oldest Grandfather Monkey
with a squeeze of her tail, when the shock of her acrobatics
sent him over the border to the far side of sleep.
Fruit rained down where she swatted the trunks of great trees,
and she calculated the best way of skinning bananas
using nothing more than a tray of sand and her tail.

At the end of the exam, decorously squeezing
the proffered tails of the Monkey Council one by one,
she shook them firmly, as a proper civilized Monkey
does, and swung off, following the river back home
bearing confidence enough in her successes, and
remembering Tiger’s having felt such envy,
wishing aloud to the moon that his own striped tail
could ever be anything like half as clever as hers.

– Gord Sellar, April 2004

There was a time when Tiger smoked
–not cigarettes, not that sort of thing–
and cast his bleary eyes about him, round
the den of a strange sweet family in India.

That was in the days when Monkey swung
and hung among thickets of foreign pines,
snatching up unattended beer and potato chips
and chittering her way through foreign tongues.

Their feet touched the Joseon soil again
on the very same day, the same hour.

Beneath a mutant cherry-blossom tree,
Tiger reclined. Monkey chittered with glee,
scooped up three pawfuls of fallen pink
petals, and sprayed them onto his crown.

He snorted, a little amused, and took a puff,
then showed her a line of foul old fine-drawn teeth.
Hanging from a branch, she blinked and shook
it, and onto them both, petals rained down endless.

– Gord Sellar