Excerpts from an Encyclopedia of Awakenings

Excerpts from an Encyclopedia of Awakenings

Information comes like a bell

In the middle of the night.

Tamu Massif is the largest volcano.

It is as big, my correspondent

tells me, as the British Isles;

And is still spewing lava

after one hundred and forty million years.

That is the way it is. I awaken

at three AM, and now I listen

to the dog. His moans are like the horn

of a distant freight train in the desert.

He must be having  bad dreams.

I’ll have to speak to him about that

in the morning. Yesterday

he was asked to leave the Verizon store

because he was barking

at a woman who tried to pet him.

He can be ferocious, I told the clerk,

And he remembers any kind of put down.

I’ve been training him in self defense

and my wife has been reading to him

from a book on Lie Algebra.

I have never seen an estimate

of a dog’s IQ. My wife

thinks ours is a genius, but she thought

the same about our children.

At four AM I wake up again,

with disturbed musings about dysfunctional

Mitochondria, and that loss of their telemeres

is what is making me grow old.

This has got to stop, these thoughts, I think.

Even the dog is asleep.

Return