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.