A silverfish
in the sink when
I rinse my cup.
I lift the trap so
the water will sweep
it down, wayward
eyelash, eater of books.
And the rest
of the day I’m dogged
by a vague
anxiety, as when
an end parenthesis has
failed to put in its
expected appearance,
replaced perhaps by
a small hole clear
through the page
& an italic f
just visible beyond.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Bridge to Nowhere
- Natural Faculties
- (Re-)Claiming the Body
- Ceiling snakes
- Train Song
- Surgery of the Absurd
- Notes toward a taxonomy of sadness
- Weeding
- Blanket
- Forecast
- Curriculum Vitae
- Lullaby
- Fist
- On Reading The Separate Rose by Pablo Neruda
- Gibbous
- Song of the Millipede
- Autumn haibun
- Bread & Water
- Jersey Shore
- Initiation
- October dusk
- Goodnight moon
- Antidote
- The Starlings
- To the Child I Never Had
- Ambitions
- Learn Harmonica Today
- Two-line haiku
- Sleeper Cell
- Unchurched
- Turnips
- Homiletics
- Magic Carpet
- When the Wind is Southerly
- Connection
- Ground Beetle
- Étude for the World’s Smallest Violin
Small is beautiful. I love this so much, as it curls and trails its tiny way just like a silverfish.
Thanks, Jean! Uncharacteristically, I sat on this poem for a day before posting, and I think it’s much improved as a result, but I still wasn’t prepared for all these warm reactions from y’all.
That is really lovely… I recently wrote my first poem in about five years, and I hope that it wasn’t a one-time anomaly and I continue finding inspiration for more. We’ll see.
Hey, that’s great! I am always wishing more people with training in life sciences would make a serious study of poetry. Most practicing poets are stuck recylcling the same old humanist images and tropes and could use a transfusion of new ideas.
Marvelous, Dave.
Thanks, Beth.
Wonderful.
Glad you liked.
I really liked how that nagging feeling is depicted as a sense that something’s missing on the page. And, yet, in that absence, something new is revealed. As Dale said, Wonderful.
Thanks, man — I’m glad that worked for you. I guess I shouldn’t have worried that I hadn’t done enough to communicate that minor off-kilter feeling. Most everyone is familiar with it from reading certain poems where end parentheses are intentionally omitted.
It’s always the drain for the silverfish. I’m not sure why I feel worse killing these bugs than others. Maybe it’s the appetite for print I share with them. Maybe their love for old letters in my parents’ attic.
Really nice poem. It drains. The drain and the small hole and the eye in eyelash; the late parenthesis and the italic f and the lash in eyelash.
Yes, silverfish “R” us! Thanks for the good words and commentary, Peter — I do admire the way you analyze poems.
Just right, Dave. A keeper just as it is. And I love the notion of ‘an end parenthesis (that) has / failed to put in its / expected appearance’ as a characterisation of niggling unease over time.
Hi Dick — Thanks for weighing in. This is very reassuring to hear.
Silverfish totally creep me out…
I love the “wayward eyelash” though.
Thanks! I find earwigs creepy as hell, but silverfish, not so much.