Published by Associate Editor on November 15, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 24, Issue 24 Featured Poet, Issue 24 Poetry, Poetry

Crossing the Mekong by Roald Hoffmann

Illustration by Sue Babcock

The sun touches the treetops. In,
among the middle branch leaves,
ruffed gibbon faces. They stretch,
lick fur dry. It’s time, to greet
neighbors with the morning’s old
songs, time to check the soft-spined
rambutan fruit. Climbing high
for the launch, spread out flat,
changing direction in midleap,
shaping out of air a vector
tunnel of openings and branches,
the yelping gibbons' arboreal swing.

Their children cling,
				ours crawl.
We invented the beauty parlor,
				but take out our own splinters.
				They groom each other.
Apes have dominant males
				who defend estate, sexual
				territory. We get married.
				Gibbons are almost like us.
And when the stranger comes,
				swinging in an out-
				of-season coat, armed,
				smelling of his feed, we
				just look, furtively, look.
				They scatter to howl away
				the green-brown sky.
If mother is taken far
				apes cower, babies cry.

When a man of the Hmong dies
the gibbons know. They come
from the highlands in the night,
stand guard, eat the offering.

The monkey king gently wraps
the man's soul in a white cloth
bears it off in phantom leaps
the stars’ tree limbs meeting
his confident long hand reach,
across the muddy river, back home.	  

Roald Hoffmann was born in 1937 in Złoczów, then Poland. He came to the US in 1949, and has long been at Cornell University in the USA, active as a theoretical chemist. In chemistry, he has taught generations how to think about molecular orbitals.

Hoffmann is also a writer, carving out his own land between poetry, philosophy, and science. He has published five books of non-fiction, written three produced plays, and six volumes of poetry, including two book length selections of his poems in Spanish and Russian translations.

Tags: Poetry, Roald Hoffmann