something very old
Published in Cordite Poetry Review, August 2019:
Inner monologues are set forth in North America from deserts to mountaintops
in cutting room fashion,
measures between two and three feet in length,
runs hot and cold,
active only at night,
they feed principally on the difference between a pond and a lake
a haircut and a beheading
Digs shallow burrows,
blowing my nose and lying in bed with my shoes on,
settling into their new apartments in combination with fleas
larger than mice, grabs her shoulders and plants a kiss on her cheek,
their faces and buttocks marked with vivid purples and reds,
precisely because we are human
Having no technical meanings,
improvising his own plan, seemingly on a daily basis,
something very old
of which we have not freed and may never free ourselves
that decimated populations in 29 minutes
and the NBC broadcast it in full,
unedited,
including its tail
Flashing back to the leaf mould of the forest floors
with scant regard for chronology
between moles and shrews
yet it also covered terrain as if we’re old friends and it occurs to me that maybe
we are.
(Collage poem, with text from articles in the November 23, 2017 issue of the New York Review of Books, and from The Living World of Animals, Readers Digest Association, 1970)