July 2021
Author's Note: Many readers of Verse-Virtual already know what sapphic stanzas are— a complicated verse form made up entirely of trochees and dactyls, with a shorter line at the end of each four-line stanza. (And I realize that probably few of them actually care very much!) But here’s one that attempts to echo the regular motion of tubing down the Wisconsin River, maybe adding to the effect of the poem
Summer Sapphics
Maybe things are better than we imagine
if a rubber inner-tube still can send us
drifting down a sinuous, tree-draped river
like the Wisconsin—
far removed from spores of Touristococcus.
As we bob half-in and half-out of water
with our legs like tentacles, dangling limply
under the surface
we are like invertebrate creatures, floating
on a cosmic droplet—a caravan of
giant-sized amoebas, without a clear-cut
sense of direction.
It’s as if we’ve started evolving backwards:
mammal, reptile, polliwog, protozoon—
toward that dark primordial soup we seem so
eager to get to.
Funny, how warm water will whisper secrets
in its native language to every cell— yet
we, the aggregation, have just begun to
fathom the gestures.
©2021 FirstLast
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It is very important. -JL