for Gabriel
Jane Goodall met him in Brazzaville zoo – a living skeleton, every bone in his body visible, almost hairless from malnutrition. Born 1944. Believed to be the oldest chimpanzee in the world.
Note from James and Other Apes. Photographs by James Mollison
Shakespeare – imagine him
Granted a further decade as God’s spy.
He might have looked like this:
blanched white
The patchy beard, and parched the mottled skin.
Or Rembrandt, older still, and with an eye
As dim,
A will as faint,
A hand too frail to lift a brush and paint
His own nobility exposed to light.