Poetry

 

 

Jared Smith

Where The Web is And Where it is Not

Write about Nederland and Eldora, the tourist shops,
schools, mountain towns, nurseries for the troops deploying
to protect their homeland from the tourist shops of the Mid-East.
The log cabins, tin trailers, recreational weed shops of Colorado
where the boys want to fly on metal wings. This day it was
a day of sudden squalls and flash floods in the high mountains
across the Continental Divide, and of monsoon rains
from the Front Range to India and Pakistan and Syria, a day
when Eldora and Ward, Colorado, with their insignificant population
were off the Web and dark rooms at sea were filled
with magnetic pings and electronic order for the mountain boys.

 

Surely it must have been a generation ago

On this very cold day
I wanted to write a poem about fruit flies
yours in particular getting stoppered
with ether inside their agar-filled universe,
pausing in all their copulations for you
to separate their red eyed demons
from their white eyed angelic daemons
and folding their ethereal wings
as you picked each one by tweezers
and noted their names and numbers
with marks twice the size of their torsos,
the very means of transportation for
their genetic equipment you were studying
but never did get to see under magnification,
studying what their attractions were to each other
and what their universe of glass meant to men,
and what it meant when they turned to mathematics
swirling on your pages as equations
in the generations they spent there rolling the dice
in all their fervent fear and excrement, generations
going by in days skeletons on skeletons
breeding and feeding upon each others dreams
if such little things can even dream
or fear the forked tin tipped tweezers
connecting them briefly to the larger world
where you sat studying lives without names.

 

 

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