Cave Man

"Neandertals were initially regarded as dim-witted brutes with clubs and beast-like features. This misconception was due to French paleontologist, Marcellin Boule, [who] left a permanent scar on the Neandertals image that would not begin to heal until many years later...." (contemporary archeologist, Kharlena Mara Ramanan)

Boule got it wrong.

Turns out Neanderthal
was not the neighbor we thought,
low-browed brute, shambling hirsute
through forested La Chapelle-aux-Saints.

From behind that myth, Ur-fiction
swung at a million throbbing temples,
steps a man, faintly nasal, warmly dressed,
serenading across time's garden hedge.

Like us he purses his everyday from a flute.
He shoots the breeze, collects cutters, cleavers,
cunning denticulates, comes knocking on Sundays
with salmon salted just downstream from gravlax.

No-one toppled into the graves he visits.
Magdalenian hunters, children lie wrapped
in mammoth spirit; hyacinth and mallow
sweet the woman whose fractures he almost fixed.

Because we've come of age, hands to wash,
votes to block, the beast inside is slow and dumb
and harder to recognize. Sniff the air at home,
in the workplace — fear trailing cologne, aftershave.

© Christian Simon