November Morning

November Morning

I heard it last night,
water coursing down tree limbs,
rooftops, gutters, roadways, cars,
and trash bins. Did the
outside of things get a good washing?

The morning sky is a damp cotton cloth, where
light seeps over the tree branches outside my window,
along with steady wetness. The season
of washing the outsides of things
has started. The tiny drops rush into
prickly tree needles and brown places: the leaves,
the fences, mossy eaves. The cotton sky keeps
the world inside warmed and contemplating,
while making the outside of things cool, wet, soft,
reflective.


(11/17/2011)

Trilobite Song (1997)

Trilobite Song


Oh, to be a trilobite in some primordial goop —
A wriggly something wiggling in the three-tone frothy soup!
I have five eighty-thousand toes, a delightsome fearful lot,
And when I stick them in my mouth, I taste the meal I've caught.

Oh, to be a trilobite in long-forgotten seas.
I hunker down a darkened hole and flex my billion knees.
And though I never see the sun, so far I swim and swam,
I pass the night with planktonite, and dinner with a clam.

Oh, to be a three-lobed shellfish in the Paleozoic,
I eat enough creapy stuff to make a person go “ick!”
But I'm never sad or lazy — I just pass the time
Resting in my briny niche from evolution’s climb.

Oh, to be a trilobite, to don my sticky bonnet
Though, you say, it’s not that way — and I had never thought it.
But if you doubt what I'm about, you can keep your money.
I'll just smile and sweetly say, “It’s in the genes, Honey.”



(3/23/97)


It had been over a month since my last contribution on here, and since I resolved to blog at least once per month I dug up this older poem from around the time I started getting interested again in writing.

I don’t always explain or comment on my poems, but this one got me thinking recently about what it was really “about.” On the surface, it’s playful and poking fun at the debate over teaching evolution in the public schools. It occurred to me the other day that as a social commentary, I probably had in mind on some deeper level how dependent we are today (even back in 1997) on digital technology. What would we really do right now if we didn’t have computers to do so much for us, with their “eighty-thousand toes” to count on? Could we make it? Maybe finding meaning in life would be more a matter of bare essentials and not chasing down life between sips of sleep while the clocks and calendars and computers keeps us running. At least we still have family and friends on our digital docks. And DVD collections of all our favorite TV shows are kind of nice.