And if I were a poet it would go something like this:
Feeling Sorry for Myself While Standing Before the
Stegosaurus at the Natural History Museum in London
Oh yes my friend, I’ve been there: the insects battering at the armored lids of your yellowish eyes
the moment you pecked your way out of that rotten shell and dug out from your sandpit nest …
And I’ve experienced the thud thud thud of your days, the indigestible monotony
of everything’s spiny orangy-green husk. How the sun gets daily whiter and hotter and just
a little bit closer. The week spent gobbling down your
own weight’s worth of whatever. One stumpy footprint after another, tracking the trackless, squelching
across last night’s marsh into a volcano-spattered today hip-deep in ash and yawning
a muzzleful of sulfur. Swishing through stiff fronds,
we drag an unbearable load of tombstones on our back and a fat lugubrious tail, shit-smutched and
spiked. The flattening of the razor grass. The forgotten clutch of eggs. Our shrill yaps
and groans. That tiny gray walnut for a brain and the fat black tongue tough as a bootsole …
They’ve explained us away a dozen times: some passing meteorite or another, the rat-like mammals
eating our pitiful young, all kinds of new weather. Issueless, but far too stupid to be forlorn,
we trundle along the pink quartz shore to sip at the lukewarm edge of yet another evaporating sea.
New Ohio Review Fall 2010