KCST 2: "Squirrels" by Victoria Doose (Centauromadoose)

As told by Victoria Doose (Centauromadoose)

I tried to write a poem about squirrels last week

as I walked on campus, watching their fervent tails catch the wind.

It sounded nice, I suppose,

with images of them skip-hopping frivolously,

their invisible claws snagging earth,

but it was just about squirrels.

It reminded me of a professor in my sophomore year

who often listened to student poems and,

with brown baleful eyes,

snarled her lips and shrieked: “So what?”

A poem has to have meaning,

every line and phrase and comma

leading to a bigger idea, a purpose, a revelation.

Every time I cross campus now, the squirrels lift their faces

and I see their little lips start curling up

as I pass with my fists like rocks in my pockets.

Yesterday I read a story about a broken woman

who caught a baby squirrel in her unsteady hands

and marveled at its shining eyes and ears.

I wished I could hold the little creature,

flip it belly to back, breathe in its face and have it,

somehow, not mind, maybe even offer me a baby squirrel smile

with both corners of its mouth sweetly sweeping to its eyes.

I composed a poem about it as I walked across campus again –

the whole beautiful thing in an unstoppable flow, charming, precise,

but once it was completed, it was gone,

disappeared from my fingers on the keyboard back home.

I cracked my knuckles and chewed pencils over it

for an hour, maybe two – where had I lost my poem,

how could I get it back?

But it was about a baby squirrel I had never even met

and by the third hour it didn’t bother me anymore

that the folds of my brain no longer cushioned the newborn

tender phrases of that baby, its first words, gone.

I know my professor would have read

those poems, animals frolicking and smiling,

and glared with the brown gaze of profundity.

Wadded up somewhere are the webbed wisps of my thoughts,

and those shabby beasts keep snarling at me when I pass –

they flash their teeth as if they know what I have done,

or tried to do, what I discovered about them,

or didn’t, and it’s all right with me, now; I throw rocks as I go by.

Not everything can be a poem.