The cri du coeur below were written in the first year of the Trump administration, a dystopian period we seem in danger of revisiting. I had in mind to write thirteen poems in homage to Wallace Stevens and his “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” but found that each of these made me want to take a shower with soap made of stinging lye—the only solution I could imagine to the daily onslaught of stupidities from the Liar-in-Chief. So this project joined numerous others I began but never finished. Impulses to write such things, I discovered, don’t make for good poetry, at least for me, and worse, writing in this vein deepened my depression.

That depression has returned over the past few months, of course, as the ex-LIC’s craven inventions have swelled to flood stage. (For a sampling, visit this fact check of just 32 lies he has cheerlessly repeated during his current campaign.) I’m reminded of an interview with Irish novelist Benedict Kiely conducted by Kathleen Cain and published in The Bloomsbury Review (requiescat in pace). Kiely had recently published his extraordinary book, Nothing Happens in Carmincross, a harrowing, insightful novel about The Troubles. Kathleen asked him, as I recall, how it felt to have completed a book he’d struggled with for many a year. “How did it feel,” I seem to remember her asking, “when you dropped the finished manuscript in the mail?” “Ah,” Kiley said, “it was like spittin’ poison out o’ me system.” Consider this a warning about what follows here.

Concerning the Orange Ape

[Disclaimer: No actual apes have been harmed in the writing of these poems.]

I

Flying Dream

Among twenty snowy mountains,
each the shape of a woman’s breast,

some pointedly alert, some round
and smooth as in heedless surrender,

among twenty white naked breasts
the Orange Ape flapped like a crow,

hating his blackness and thus afraid
to land and walk among the peaks,

afraid to kiss, kiss, kiss them (as
would be his wont) with the black

thorn of his beak, able only to drift,
leering with his rheumy, insatiable eye.

II

The Orange Ape plucks turdlets from his ass hair, sniffs his leathery fingers. He wiggles them under one factotum’s nose and murmurs: “Sweeter than Chanel No. Five, I can tell you.” He glares until the man nods, but he doesn’t withdraw his hand until the man blurts out, “Chanel’s nothing. Chanel’s a disaster!” With one shard-of-anthracite nail the Ape fondly strokes the man’s cheek, streaking it with filth. Then he turns to the next cowering member of his “circle of trusted advisors.”

III

NEW POLL: EVANGELICALS RESPOND

By a large margin, deniers of Darwin’s theory say they believe the Orange Ape will evolve in office.

IV

The Orange Ape Visits the Western Wall

He who has never wailed for anything but more arrives at the ancient limestone anthology of laments and supplications. A skull-cap floats on his orange comb-over. He can’t hear, above the photojournalists’ rapid-fire Nikons, the gush of Yaweh’s breath into the first man’s nostrils; nor can he see the stairs that spiral up near where he stands—a double helix where angels climb and descend more smoothly than elevators in a black glass tower. Now the Orange Ape grants the Wall a five-degree tilt of his head, shuts his eyes, pats the pitted rock. He holds the pose just long enough for the cameras to capture an image of piety that he counts on playing like Revelations across the born-again Twitterverse.

V

We don’t know which sickens us most:
his grunt-inflected lies, or the cadre
of flacks playing down his innuendoes.
The Orange Ape tweeting,
or just after.

VI

Another Flying Dream

The Orange Ape’s aloft again, circling crazily in the wind,
feathers whitewashed so he looks more angelic than any ape
in the history of the world,. And he swoops, twists, dives and soars
the way he did as a kid until his father slapped him down, caged
him and gave him nothing but money to eat, so that he grew strong
in cunning and cruelty because it pleased the old man and pleased,
in the end, himself. Yet he still feels the burn of the father-rage
as he flies out over the desert, far from voluptuous snowy peaks,
flying low now over a landscape of greasewood and cactus.
Now over a rocky rise the cages appear, chain link and razor wire
camps teeming with brown kids made parentless, the lucky bastards.
But where (he wonders) is the thanks they owe me? Now he swoops
low over the upturned, exhausted faces, dark eyes that seeing him
know he is an angel, an angel of perfect whiteness. And veering
lower over the captives now he shits and shits, thinking: This
is my body. Take and eat, dear orphans, in remembrance of me.

VII

Apes at sunset show signs of
melancholy and agitation.

—Dennis Potter

The Orange Ape bowlegs along the Potomac, flanked by black suits and cherry trees flaunting their blossoms. Under an especially copious branch, he pauses, snaps it off, ambles down to the riverbank and there begins flogging the current. “Stop!” he howls, whipping the water in a cloud of torn petals. But the river flows on.

Now he bellows at a cloud overhead, brandishing the nearly bare branch like a flail. But the cloud sails on, and the Ape hunkers down with his smartphone. Hours go by as he broadcasts a blizzard of tweets, and his followers share each one without reading it.

At last he spies the sun declining over the westward hills and heaves himself  up, waving to his side a favorite bodyguard. “Watch this, Mr. Smith,” he says in a stage whisper, then roars: “Go down, sun! Go down—I command it!”

And the sun complies, continuing its slow descent. The Ape thumps his chest with both fists, then drapes an arm over the guard’s shoulder. “You’re my witness,” he huffs. “And don’t forget—you serve at my pleasure.” He pours a throaty chortle into the deepening dusk. “You and the sun, Mr. Smith. You and the sun.”